Page2RRS

• 24 Nov 2009 12:55

  HEATHERS DON’T CHECK! We Heathers pick-and-choose our facts. Here–let The Doctor show you: TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2009 Errands abound: Tomorrow, we’re on our way to Chapel Hill, on a mission of major importance. Today, we’re running important errands. Tomorrow, we’ll post, then depart. PART 3—HEATHERS DON’T CHECK: Remember when pundits would talk about the “criminalization of politics?” In recent weeks, we have once again seen the psychiatrization of same. We Heathers have been out in force, calling Sarah Palin a liar. But as in 1999, so today: Calling the politician-you-hate a liar no longer seems enough. Today, as then, we Heathers like to mix some psychiatry in. And sure enough! The Doctor was IN at The Daily Beast when Michelle Goldberg shrieked and clattered about Sarah Palin’s disturbing lies (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 11/23/09). You see, Palin wasn’t a regular liar. The Doctor went one step beyond Goldberg isn’t a shrink, of course; she just plays one on TV. (She diagnosed Palin in The Beast—and on last Thursday’s Larry King Live.) In the course of rendering her inexpert diagnosis, she borrowed a framework from the last decade—a framework the Heathers aimed at Candidate Gore when he was the pig they were trying to kill. Palin lies when there’s little to be gained! Having adopted this Gore-tested framework, Goldberg’s next step was perfectly clear: Let’s turn to the DSM! It seems to fit Palin perfectly! In our view, this sort of thing is dumb on its face. (Purdum is the world’s biggest Heather.) It’s a substitute for thought and argument, resorted to by the preening Heathers who define a lightweight age—who substitute this sort of clatter for winning progressive argument. But can we talk? If you’re going to diagnose someone as a psychiatric liar, you might want to start by making sure that her “lies” are really inaccurate. Not every inaccurate statement is a lie, of course. Sometimes, people just make mistakes. But if you’re going to call someone a liar—even worse, a pathological liar—you might want to start by making sure that her statements aren’t actually accurate. Goldberg seems to have spent little time on this part of her task. In this passage, we see The Doctor identify the first of the “lies” which led to her troubling diagnosis: GOLDBERG: To be sure, some of the factually incorrect stuff in Going Rogue may be the result of ignorance as much as dishonesty. On page 391, she writes, “Ronald Reagan faced an even worse recession. He showed us how to get out of one. If you want real job growth, cut capital gains taxes and slay the death tax once and for all.” Every assertion in these sentences is untrue. The current recession is far worse than anything Reagan faced. Reagan did not get rid of the estate tax, which Palin calls the “death tax.” And capital gains taxes are lower now than they were during the Reagan administration. But Palin might not be being deliberately misleading; maybe she just doesn’t know any better. The same could be true when she claims that Barack Obama “opposed laws that would protect babies born alive after botched abortions.” Maybe it was ignorance rather than deceit that led Palin to sound off about “death panels” a few months ago. Surely, though, Palin knew that she told the McCain campaign, in writing, that Bristol was pregnant, and so her story about McCain’s ace investigators digging the information up on their own was a lie. Either she was lying last year, when she told Sean Hannity that before accepting the offer to join the McCain ticket, she’d taken a family vote, or she was lying on Monday, when she told Oprah Winfrey she’d done no such thing... For our money, Goldberg’s reading in that first paragraph is highly unimpressive. This recession worse than the one Reagan faced; for our money, Palin’s statement is simply wrong about that. But it isn’t clear that Palin meant to imply that Reagan got rid of the estate tax—and the fact that “capital gains taxes are lower now” doesn’t mean that lowering same couldn’t be a way to fight this recession. In short, Goldberg’s powers of analysis already seem less than impressive—a common mark of the modern “Heather,” of whatever gender. At any rate: In the highlighted part of that second paragraph, Doctor Goldberg identifies the first of Palin’s troubling “lies.” But do you notice something odd about Goldberg’s work in that passage? That’s right! Doctor Goldberg simply asserts that Palin “told the McCain campaign, in writing, that Bristol was pregnant.” (Since Palin’s book seems to say something different, this statement is therefore a lie!) But Doctor Goldberg makes no attempt to document her own statement of fact! How does she know that Palin told the McCain camp in writing, in such a way as to turn the book’s account into a lie? Is it true? Did Palin “tell the McCain campaign, in writing, that Bristol was pregnant?” Goldberg cites no source for this claim, showing the lazy approach the typical Heather will take to such issues of fact. Good Heathers all, we in turn are simply supposed to accept her statement as accurate. But is it true? Did Palin “tell the McCain campaign, in writing, that Bristol was pregnant?” Did she do so in such a way as to make her book’s statement a lie? Like you, we don’t know The Doctor’s source. But she may be working from this recent CBS fact-check, in which Steve Chaggaris offered this account of this troubling trivia: CHAGGARIS (11/16/09): Yet Palin should have known the campaign was aware of the pregnancy by that point: She told the campaign's vice presidential vetters as much, in writing, far before she was chosen to be John McCain's running mate. Palin and the other vice presidential short-listers were asked to fill out a written questionnaire during the vetting the process, according to a "senior official close to the vetting process" who talked to reporters on September 2nd, 2008. Palin revealed Bristol's pregnancy on this written questionnaire, adding that she wanted to discuss the pregnancy orally with the campaign, according to the campaign official. A written report, which included info about the pregnancy, was presented to campaign manager Rick Davis as well as McCain before the campaign flew Palin down for the meeting she describes on Page 214. This may well be The Doctor’s source; you’ll note that her language tracks that of Chaggaris, as often happens when We Heathers cut-and-paste stories we like. But how do we know that Chaggaris is right? As many have done in recent weeks, he simply accepts the claim of an unnamed McCain “senior official,” citing something this unnamed official said on September 2, 2008. Sorry. As anyone but a Heather would know, the fact that a senior official (presumably) made this statement doesn’t make it accurate. Some background: On September 1 of that year, the McCain campaign began taking a lot of heat for its allegedly fumbled vetting of Palin. Starting that day, campaign officials began scrambling to insist that their procedures had been wondrously thorough. Some senior official may have said that Palin told the campaign in writing, far before the time she was chosen—and this claim may even be accurate. But on that same day, other officials seem to have told the Washington Post’s Dan Balz something different. Balz’s report appeared on the front page of the next day’s Post. It started like this BALZ (9/3/08): Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was not subjected to a lengthy in-person background interview with the head of Sen. John McCain’s vice presidential vetting team until last Wednesday in Arizona, the day before McCain asked her to be his running mate, and she did not disclose the fact that her 17-year-old daughter was pregnant until that meeting, two knowledgeable McCain officials acknowledged Tuesday. It isn’t clear that Balz’s account jibes with the (somewhat murky) account found in Palin’s book. But it does contradict what Chaggaris wrote; it may contradict what Goldberg asserted, as if she had her information on loan from God. When did Palin tell the team? Is the account in her book thus rendered inaccurate? Is her fleeting statement bogus? It’s possible. But Goldberg makes no attempt to say how she can be so sure. And things get worse as The Doctor proceeds. Goldberg seems to have no idea that she should source— should document—her own claims about basic facts. But uh-oh! When she does deign to source her claims, she does so quite unwisely: GOLDBERG ():The Associated Press fact-checked Palin’s false claims about relying on small donations in her political campaigns, allowing for open, competitive bidding on a natural gas pipeline and avoiding conflicts of interest as Wasilla mayor. (Palin accused the AP of doing “opposition research,” as if any attempt to hold her accountable for her own words must be a partisan plot.) As the Boston Globe reports, there’s overwhelming evidence that Palin is lying when she disavows all responsibility for her infamous $150,000 shopping spree. As the Boston Globe “reports?” In fact, Goldberg links to this Boston Globe editorial—an exceptionally unintelligent editorial at that. According to Goldberg, Palin went on an “infamous $150,000 shopping spree.”According to Goldberg, “there’s overwhelming evidence that Palin is lying when she disavows all responsibility” for this spree (whatever that means). In a rather murky way, the Globe editorial seems to semi-agree. “No one close to the campaign backs up Palin’s version” of this matter, the editorial murkily says; it then offers three clipped quotes from campaign officials who weren’t talking about the wardrobe matter when they made the clipped statements in question. The Globe doesn’t quote anything Palin specifically said about the actual wardrobe matter. The Globe simply makes a sweeping assertion: No one backs up what she said. No one backs Palin, the Globe dumbly said. But wouldn’t you know it? Just three days later, the New York Times reported a detailed interview with the well-known stylist who bought all those clothes for Palin and her family—the person who actually went on that spree. (Palin wasn’t present, she says.) And wouldn’t you know it? “Overwhelming evidence” to the contrary, Lisa Kline, the stylist in question, agrees with what Palin has said LIPTON (11/19/09): ''Wardrobegate,'' as Ms. Kline's $150,000-plus fashion transformation became known, undermined Ms. Palin's carefully crafted homespun image when the news broke two weeks before the election. Details about pricey designer clothes and a whirlwind $75,062 trip to Neiman Marcus outraged both Democrats and Republicans and may have played a role in derailing Senator John McCain's presidential ambitions. The Boston Globe recently called it ''the most damaging piece of information about'' Ms. Palin to emerge from the 2008 campaign. In her new memoir, ''Going Rogue,'' Ms. Palin is still trying to distance herself from the incident. It was a ''trumped up controversy,'' [Palin] writes. ''I never asked the New York stylists to purchase clothes, many of the items were never worn, many others were intended for the use of other people, and in the end the wardrobe items were all returned. It certainly wasn't true that I or my family had been on any kind of 'big-time shopping trips.' '' All true, Ms. Kline said this week. Kline was there—and she backs Palin’s account. Does Goldberg have any real evidence to the contrary? We doubt it. (There certainly isn’t any evidence in that Globe “report.”) But this is very much the way we Heathers now manage the news. You see, the modern Heather invents or chooses the facts he or she will run with. He or she simply decides whose account of the facts to accept. Presumably, The Doctor was itchin’ to diagnose, much as her Heather pals did ten years back. And so, much like her colleagues before her, she tended to pick-and-choose facts. (Back then, they largely invented.) The “facts” fit her novel—her diagnosis. Unfortunately, your nation’s culture has become a joke in the hands of good doctors like this. Sometimes senior officials are wrong: Sometimes senior officials misstate, whether on purpose or from error. This too was part of that Balz report: BALZ (9/3/08): Last weekend, two campaign officials told The Washington Post that the background investigation of the finalists included an FBI check of any possible ongoing criminal investigations. That information was incorrect. A knowledgeable official said Tuesday that the vetting team had hoped to run such a check but that FBI officials declined to do so because that type of inquiry is reserved for people nominated for senior administration jobs. The official also said the FBI was uncomfortable providing the information to a political campaign, rather than to government officials. One U.S. law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said the FBI does not conduct any kind of background checks or criminal history searches on behalf of political candidates or parties. Sometimes, campaign officials say things which turn out to be false. Unless their names are Wallace or Schmidt, in which case we Heathers have now decided that—not unlike with the pope in Rome—their claims are considered infallible. TOMORROW—PART 4: Then and now, new types of doctors.

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• 23 Nov 2009 20:06

  SOMETHING BORROWED, NOTHING NEW! Doctor Goldberg borrowed a framework the Heathers all used the last time: MONDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 2009 Inside the Dean dome: As currently constructed, would the Senate health reform bill add to the federal deficit? We’ll guess that it probably would. But we marveled at David Broder’s attempt to discuss this question in Sunday’s Washington Post. And yes, that is the specific question The Dean was trying to discuss. At the start of his column, he quoted a specific question in a new national poll: BRODER (11/22/09): It read: "President Obama has pledged that health insurance reform will not add to our federal budget deficit over the next decade. Do you think that President Obama will be able to keep his promise or do you think that any health care plan that Congress passes and President Obama signs will add to the federal budget deficit?" The answer: Less than one-fifth of the voters—19 percent of the sample—think he will keep his word. Nine of 10 Republicans and eight of 10 independents said that whatever passes will add to the torrent of red ink. By a margin of four to three, even Democrats agreed this is likely. Will a health reform bill add to the federal deficit? In theory, that’s what Broder was judging. But soon, he quoted a pair of experts. Robert Bixby went first: BRODER: While the CBO said that both the House-passed bill and the one Reid has drafted meet Obama's test by being budget-neutral, every expert I have talked to says that the public has it right. These bills, as they stand, are budget-busters. Here, for example, is what Robert Bixby, the executive director of the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan group of budget watchdogs, told me: "The Senate bill is better than the House version, but there's not much reform in this bill. As of now, it's basically a big entitlement expansion, plus tax increases.” You may think Bixby’s assessments are accurate—but they don’t specifically speak to the question of the federal deficit. (Duh. If those tax increases are big enough, they will offset the new spending.) But then, things only got worse when Broder quoted his second expert: BRODER (continuing directly): Here's another expert, Maya MacGuineas, the president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget: “While this bill does a better job than the House version at reducing the deficit and controlling costs, it still doesn't do enough. Given the political system's aversion to tax increases and spending cuts, I worry about what the final bill will look like.” MacGuineas seems to say that the bill would reduce the federal deficit—it just wouldn’t do so enough. As Broder continued, he never quite straightened out the confusion. At one point, he once again seemed to (maybe) conflate the question of new spending in the bill with the question of additional deficits. To his credit, he fumbled around with some relevant points; well-versed readers may have thought they knew what he meant. But his work was murky from start right to finish. For us, this brought back memories. We recalled the halcyon days when Broder mocked two typical targets for boring him with policy speeches—policy speeches filled with “swell ideas,” policy speeches which weren’t about “the state of [Hillary Clinton’s] marriage” (links below). The Dean was bored by those policy speeches. After reading his fumbling Sunday effort, we’ll only offer this suggestion: Maybe The Dean should have listened up better when serious people tried to show him how to analysze serious topics. Our own opinion? When it comes to this fumbling Dean, a real newspaper would have put down its foot at least nine years ago. Visit our incomparable archives: At the 2000 Democratic convention, Gore’s speech was so full of “swell ideas,” it almost put The Dean to sleep. See THE DAILY HOWLER, 9/22/06 When Hillary Clinton spoke about energy issues, The Dean was bothered by her know-it-all tone—and by her failure to discuss “the state of her marriage.” See THE DAILY HOWLER, 5/25/06. Maureen Dowd had been bored by Clinton’s speech too. See THE DAILY HOWLER, 5/24/06—or just marvel at this: DOWD (5/24/06): Al Gore must want to punch Hillary Clinton right through the hole in the ozone layer. At the National Press Club here yesterday, the New York senator finally took a passionate stand. After giving a courteous nod to her old rival Al as “a committed visionary on global warming,” she purloined his issue and his revolution, going his Earth Tones in the Balance one better by wearing a blinding yellow pantsuit that looked as if it could provide solar power to all of Tennessee. Yesterday, Broder tried to talk about policy! It was a column-long, twilight struggle. Well-twinned Heathers: How inane are the Antoinettes? How widely established is their boredom-based culture? Below, you see Broder describing Gore’s boring speech—and Dowd describing Clinton’s: BRODER (8/20/00): One more paragraph and he would have been onto the budget of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. On some of the headline proposals—for Medicare prescription drug benefits or a patient's bill of rights—Gore humanized his presentation by pointing to specially invited families in the audience who would have benefitted directly from the programs he is promoting. But I have to confess, my attention wandered as he went on through page after page of other swell ideas, and somewhere between hate crimes legislation and a crime victim's constitutional amendment, I almost nodded off. DOWD (5/24/06): She droned on numbingly about carbon dioxide sequestration, biomass liquid fuel bases, ''feebate'' tax incentives, hybrid plug-ins, flex-fueled vehicles, continuous reheat furnaces, renewable portfolio standards, Danish wind power, Brazilian ethanol and Kyoto greenhouse targets. (And you thought she was incomprehensible on health care.) She got so far down in the weeds—or switch grass—that she advised her listeners about weatherizing their homes and checking their tires to save fuel. The Heathers always know what they like. And darlings! The Heathers don’t like it when pols “drone on” through pages of “swell ideas.” PART 2—SOMETHING BORROWED, NOTHING NEW: Society’s Heathers have been out in force, critiquing Sarah Palin’s book (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 11/20/09). Just consider the New York Times’ twinned Heathers, the nincompoops Rich and Dowd. In yesterday’s column, Dowd let you know, right from the jump, why you should look down on Palin. If you want to know how conservatives prosper, you don’t have to read the whole column DOWD (11/22/09): It’s easy to dismiss Sarah Palin. She’s back on the trail, with the tumbling hair and tumbling thoughts. The queen of the scenic strip mall known as Wasilla now reigns over thrilled subjects thronging to a politically strategic swath of American strip malls. The conservative celebrity clearly hasn’t boned up on anything, except her own endless odyssey of self-discovery. And she still has that Yoda-like syntax. As usual, Dowd started with her target’s hair, then told you what the hair represents. (From 1997 through November 2000, she devoted six columns to Candidate Gore’s bald spot. Candidate Edwards was routinely “The Breck Girl.” With Giuliani, it was always the comb-over.) Sarah Palin is queen of the strip malls, this big dumb Heather instructed her readers. But Rich, if anything, started out dumber. Where do they find these people? RICH (11/22/09): At last the American right and left have one issue they unequivocally agree on: You don’t actually have to read Sarah Palin’s book to have an opinion about it. Last Sunday, Liz Cheney praised “Going Rogue” as “well-written” on Fox News even though, by her own account, she had sampled only “parts” of it. On Tuesday, Ana Marie Cox, a correspondent for Air America, belittled the book in the Washington Post while confessing that she couldn’t claim to have “completely” read it. Jesus God help us, that’s stupid. Cox is almost always fatuous; Rich provides a small public service by starting to mainstream this observation. (In the feather-weight province called liberal cable, Cox’s fatuity gets dished to young liberals as part of the program.) But to state what is blindingly obvious, you don’t have to read an entire book to be able to say if the book is well-written. And you don’t have to read a book “completely” before you critique its contents. Predictably, Cox’s critique was inane. By way of contrast, we agree with most, not all, of what Cheney said. (“It's a good read. It's well written. She comes across, you know, as very likable, as somebody with a lot of common sense. When she does make criticism, I have to say she does it with a pretty deft touch, and the book is moving in some parts.”) We’d skip the claim about Palin’s wealth of common sense. Otherwise, we would agree with Cheney. Like it or not, the book is well written. (Cue choir of Heathers: But Palin didn’t write it!) And we’d have to say it’s much more interesting than most such political books. Rich and Dowd put on a show, as they almost always do. But for our money, last week’s biggest Heather (we choose the gender-tinged term for a reason) was The Daily Beast’s Michelle Goldberg. In fairness, she didn’t discuss Palin’s hair. Instead, she found something dumber DAILY BEAST SYNOPSIS (11/18/09): Does Sarah Palin suffer from narcissistic personality disorder? Michelle Goldberg puts America’s hottest author on the couch. Jesus God help us, that’s dumb! Goldberg isn’t a shrink, of course. She only plays one on TV (Thursday’s Larry King Live) and in print, just as the “jeering Heathers” did as the last decade was ending. Playing a shrink is never a real good idea for a journalist. But Goldberg made the move even dumber by citing the hapless Todd Purdum: GOLDBERG (11/18/09): This summer, remember, Todd Purdham wrote in Vanity Fair that several Alaskans had told him, “independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of ‘narcissistic personality disorder’ in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—‘a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy’—and thought it fit her perfectly.” At the time, this struck me as a stretch, since all politicians are narcissistic and grandiose to one degree or another. But it turns out there’s a real connection between this disorder and Palin’s chronic dishonesty. Purdum had been shocked—just shocked!—when Alaskans delivered this diagnosis. Independently of one another! But as we noted at the time, Purdum was either faking it in that piece, or he’s impossibly dumb. In web-era politics, it has long been completely conventional for partisans to aim this diagnosis at pols with whom they disagree; at that time, we found more links for “Obama AND narcissistic personality disorder” than for Palin AND same (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 7/6/09). Yet Purdum was shocked—just shocked!—when several Alaskans, “independently of each other,” told him they had come up with this diagnosis. If Purdum was acting in good faith, he was dumb as a bag of old rocks. Citing his crapola four months later, Goldberg is even dumber. Does Palin have this psychiatric dysfunction, or perhaps some other? It’s always possible, of course. But there’s no way of knowing about such things; when writers like Goldberg play the shrink this way, they’re letting you know that they are among the dumbest bunnies on earth. (Or that they think you are.) But Doctor Goldberg wasn’t content with this most common web-era diagnosis. As she started her pitiful piece, she journeyed back a full ten years, borrowing the groaning framework the Heathers used the last time they played this game: GOLDBERG: All politicians may lie, but not all politicians lie like Sarah Palin. Many people in public life lie to avoid getting caught when they do something wrong; call them “I did not have sex with that woman!” lies. Or they mislead about their own experiences and accomplishments, like Hillary Clinton and her untrue tales of dodging bullets in Bosnia. Palin, however, lies when there’s little to be gained by lying, and she lies when everyone knows the truth. If Bill Clinton were a Palin-style liar, he’d still be insisting that his relationship with Monica Lewinsky was entirely chaste, or he’d claim that he never denied it in the first place. If Hillary Clinton lied like Palin, she’d put the Bosnia anecdote in her next memoir. Palin’s new book, Going Rogue, coupled with her recent media appearances, evinces a dishonesty that seems as much clinical as opportunistic. Maybe Palin really does suffer from narcissistic personality disorder. It may be that Goldberg’s too dumb to remember. Perhaps she’s just playing her readers for fools. But that is precisely the framework the “jeering Heathers” used in 1999 and 2000, when they were determined to turn Candidate Gore into a clinical liar. In the early days, Doctor Bill Turque was constantly IN, working from his couch at Newsweek—although, in time, they took turns reciting the good doctor’s groaning framework. What follows is an early expression of same. It appeared in Newsweek, just as the “jeering Heathers” began working to establish the claim that Candidate Gore had lied about Love Canal: TURQUE (12/13/99): Perhaps most disabling for Gore are episodes like the Love Canal stretch: small but easy-to-spot untruths. Together with past misstatements—like claiming to have created the Internet—they feed the notion that he's a phony. With the campaign press now on full embellishment alert, the slightest deviation from fact, no matter how innocuous, will stick like chewing gum to the heel of his shoe. What's mystifying is that, in each instance, the straight story is just as laudable. He didn't uncover Love Canal, but he did help lead the fight against toxic-waste dumping. Gore wasn't the father of the Internet, but he was arguably an uncle, sponsoring legislation that fostered its growth. Gore, who has devoted himself to loosening up in public, may discover that while voters will accept some stiffness in their candidates, grandiosity never sells. Like Doctor Goldberg, Doctor Turque was constantly puzzled. Candidate Gore kept telling lies even when the truth was just as laudable. Then, as now, it was mystifying! Why would he do such a thing? In fact, Gore’s “small but easy-to-spot untruth” wasn’t an untruth at all. But this passage may have been the first expression of a framework many Heathers would eventually pimp: Mystifyingly, Candidate Gore kept telling lies even when the truth was as good. As the weeks went by, Doctor Turque kept reciting this diagnosis. Before too long, the other children stood in line to recite it. This is how the Heathers conspired to send George Bush to the White House. It should be disgusting to see a Heather bringing this silly old framework back—unless she has very strong evidence backing her assertions. Is Sarah Palin psychiatrically disordered? It’s always possible, of course—but Doctor Goldberg has no way of knowing. Neither does the willing beard who played the fool in support of her theory. There’s always some professor or other who will back a clown like Goldberg in trade for a bit of reflected glory—perhaps for a few more book sales. In this case, it is the unfortunate “Charles V. Ford, the author of Lies! Lies! Lies! The Psychology of Deceit, and a professor of psychiatry at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine.” But again, let’s get clear on the ethics: If you’re going to write a piece with a groaning old framework accusing some pol of some psychiatric disorder, you probably ought to get your facts straight—the facts which led to your diagnosis. In this case, as ten years ago, The Doctor didn’t bother. Tomorrow—Part 3: The Doctor’s embarrassing “facts.” Wednesday—Part 4: “Jeering Heathers,” past and present.

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• 20 Nov 2009 21:00

  THE DOCTOR WAS IN! Are liberals replacing the mainstream press as the planet’s top Heathers? FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2009 Can’t explain shit/can’t focus: Should we blame the lead paint in their childhood homes? Could it be chemicals in the air? Whatever the explanation might be, it’s astounding to watch the New York Times attempt to deal with health care. Consider Robert Pear’s hapless report in this morning’s paper. Good God! After all these days, Pear actually arranges to quote some language from the Stupak amendment! But he might as well be writing in Urdu, so inept is the long-term Timesman when it comes to explaining such matters. Pear attempts to explain the difference between the House and Senate bills when it comes to funding abortion. We’d say he wrote the passage in crayon. But this would tend to overstate the skill he brought to this task. Meanwhile, we had to laugh when Pear marveled at the difference in the cost of the House and Senate bills. This is the start of his report PEAR (11/20/09): The Senate version of sweeping health legislation would cover five million fewer people than a companion bill passed by the House, but it would cost less, in part because Senate Democratic leaders felt they had to win support from fiscally conservative members of their party. [...] The Senate version of sweeping health legislation would cover five million fewer people than a companion bill passed by the House, but it would cost less, in part because Senate Democratic leaders felt they had to win support from fiscally conservative members of their party. The Senate bill would spend $821 billion over 10 years on Medicaid and subsidies. The House bill would spend 25 percent more: $1.03 trillion over 10 years. Wow! The House bill would spend substantially more over the first ten years! Only much later does Pear drop the information which shows how misleading that account is: PEAR: A major difference between the bills is the effective date for important provisions, like the requirement for people to obtain insurance and the obligation of employers to help pay for it. Many provisions of the House bill would take effect in 2013. But to help hold down the cost of the bill, Mr. Reid decided to delay the effective date for many provisions by one year, to 2014. Groan. To judge from that passage, the House bill will be in effect for seven of the next ten years. The Senate bill will be in effect for only six of thoseyears. That said, should we really be surprised when the House bill costs more? (When it costs 25 percent more, for 16 percent more years of coverage?) More to the point, is there any serious difference in level of spending once the Senate bill goes into action? It’s silly to report that difference in spending over ten years without making any attempt to deal with such an obvious question. But today’s report is an advance on yesterday’s highly annoying effort, when Pear didn’t mention the delayed starting-date for the Senate bill at all. (The Washington Post did do so.) In fairness, Pear kept readers up-to-date on the Senate bill’s number of pages. Pear’s reporting has been hapless all year. Simply put, he can’t explain shit. Then again, there’s Lady Collins, whose problem is different. She can’t focus. One bit of good news did emerge from yesterday’s column. Collins had breast cancer in 2000—and she survived. Beyond that, her column—which pretends to discuss the new mammogram guidelines—is her usually steaming sack of lightly comical blather. As she does with every topic, Collins finds ways to make breast cancer amusing—fun: Her headline is this: “The Breast Brouhaha.” Her sub-headline really delivers the fun: “Should we whammo the mammo?” We’ve told you before, though you didn’t believe us: If World War III broke out tomorrow, Lady Collins would pen a column, helping us enjoy the wry humor in New York City’s total destruction. The Lady is simply unable to focus, like all such elites through the years. Nor is she able to fashion a point about this, or any, topic. Go ahead! See if you can find any point in what she writes on this life-and-death subject. Before very long, this wriest of royals is offering this mirthful crap: COLLINS (11/19/09): I had breast cancer back in 2000, and I am trying to come up with a way that I can use that experience to shed some light on these new findings. I have never believed that everything happens for a reason. But I do feel very strongly that everything happens so that it can be turned into a column. Whatever the moral would be, I don’t think it helps Representative Camp’s argument. I had mammograms every year like clockwork, and I had just gotten a clean bill of health from my latest one when I found a lump on my left breast while watching a rerun of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” multitasker that I am. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! In case you hadn’t already noticed, Collins reveals her core philosophy here: Every event exists for one purpose—so it can help her knock off a column! And in this column, as in so many others, there is no “moral”—no point—at all. Collins writes about one medical event—her own. Obviously, no “moral” can be drawn from that single example—although she did eke out a column! In fairness, at least she didn’t wryly mention Seamus, Mitt Romney’s dead dog! You’d almost think that someone like Collins would want to help people understand those new mammogram guidelines better. You’d think she might want to help people assess “Representative Camp’s argument,” which is about as funny as a rubber crutch—which may be more of the medical disinformation Nicholas Kristof railed about, right across from Collins’ column (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 11/19/09). You might think Collins would want to help readers assess such life-and-death matters. But that would be in a different world from the world of Gotham’s royals. In the world of the New York Times, top reporters can’t explain shit—and many top pundits can’t focus. Alas! Your nation is sinking beneath the waves, powered down by these upper-class morés. Special report: We, Heathers! PART ONE—THE DOCTOR WAS IN: We use the term “Heathers” for a reason. Ten years ago, Time magazine’s Eric Pooley used the gender-tinged term to describe his own mainstream press corps. Pooley described 300 reporters in a press room, watching a major political event on large-screen TVs. Pooley’s report was quite instructive. During the hour-long event, those reporters repeatedly “erupted in a collective jeer, like a gang of 15-year-old Heathers,” he said. We’ll briefly revisit that gruesome event at the end of this new series. Pooley was right, of course. All through the last decade, the mainstream press corps—boys and girls—behaved much like a gang of Heathers, with their jeering directed at the Clintons and Gore. Today, though, the world’s top Heathers sometimes seem to be liberals. Today, could the Heathers be us? Before we look at the Daily Beast piece which occasioned this rumination, let’s consider a report by Max Blumenthal, a report we read at Blumenthal was assessing Sarah Palin’s book tour, saying that Palin’s continuing prominence could be “a cancer on the Republican Party.” That could be an accurate judgment, of course—here at THE HOWLER, we simply don’t know. But at one point, Blumenthal described Palin’s 2008 campaigning: BLUMENTHAL (11/16/09): After the market collapsed in the fall of 2008 and the McCain campaign ran off the rails, Palin untethered herself—as her book title has it, she went "rogue”—ignoring McCain's rules on attacking Obama. Instead, she lashed out at candidate Obama in her own distinctive way. "This is a man who launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist," she insisted. "This is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America." With these two lines, apparently uttered without the permission of McCain or his top aides, Palin opened up a deep schism within the campaign, while unleashing a flood of emotions from the depths of the Party faithful. "Kill him!" a man shouted at a campaign rally in Clearwater, Florida, when Palin linked Obama to terrorism, according to Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank. The next time she mentioned Obama, another man cried out, "Terrorist!" "Treason!" "Go back to Kenya!" a woman typically screamed during a Palin rally in Des Moines, Iowa. In our view, Palin’s comments about Ayers were deeply foolish and deeply unfortunate. (We have no idea why Blumenthal thinks that these repeated remarks were made without Saint McCain’s permission.) But today’s liberal rarely contents himself with the tedious practice of arguing against a candidate’s conduct. The modern liberal likes to slime the candidate’s supporters as well. Hence the passage about the “flood of emotions” Palin supposedly unleashed with her baldly unfortunate comments—the comments the great Saint McCain would never have tolerated. Hence the trio of claims about cries from Palin’s supporters. When pseudo-liberals hand you such treats, they are trying to please your soul. In our view, they’re also creating the kind of politics which tends to doom progressive interests. Question: What would it mean if someone at a Palin rally was dumb enough to yell out, “Kill him?” Logically, it wouldn’t really mean much—if it actually happened, that is. Alas. Blumenthal didn’t tell you something about Milbank’s account of that Clearwater rally. The Secret Service investigated Milbank’s account—and concluded that Milbank’s account had been wrong. (We know. Milbank wrong! What a shock!) On October 16, 2008, Salon’s Alex Koppelman reported this fact—. But thirteen months later, returned to the more pleasing practice of feeding its viewers sweet gruel. Did someone yell “Kill him” at that Clearwater rally? For ourselves, we have no idea—but the Secret Service said no. This week, Salonistas got to enjoy Milbank’s claim—and weren’t offered that later assessment. Blumenthal gave two other examples of the “flood of emotions” we libs love to hate. But note the kind of pleasing gruel on which we libs are now fed. In his second example, Blumenthal gives no clue as to where or when this man’s cry occurred. (“Terrorist! Traitor!”) In his third example, he says the cry “Go back to Kenya” was screamed (was “typically screamed”) at a Des Moines rally. No date—or link—was offered. Did actual people actually scream these actual quoted remarks? It’s certainly possible, although we have no real idea what such cries would actually mean—except as part of a leering novel, the kind of gruel on which we liberals are now constantly fed. That said, we’ve been unable to find any evidence that these particular cries did occur. Using Nexis and Google, we find no report that anyone cried “Go back to Kenya” at Palin’s October 25 Des Moines rally, the only rally she seems to have held in that city. The AP did report this: “Cries of ‘he's a socialist’ rang out from the Sioux City crowd Saturday morning and again later in Des Moines.” But we find no report of that “Go back to Kenya” cry, whether on Nexis or Google. Indeed, the Nexis archives report no hits for “Palin AND back to Kenya” at all. Nor can we find any sign that any man ever cried out "Terrorist!" "Treason!" when Palin spoke, although it’s certainly possible that someone did. At various times, people did yell each of those individual words—but such cries were reported when Saint McCain spoke as well. Did someone yell, “Kill him?” The Secret Service said this report was wrong. Did someone yell, “Go back to Kenya?” We can find no report of same. By the way: The conduct of Palin—and McCain—was reprehensible in these matters. But you know how we liberals can be! Rather than go to all the trouble of developing winning arguments about the Big Pols, we love to start sliming the Great Unwashed, hoping to let the cry of one represent the evil of all. After that, we wonder why the Great Unwashed won’t support our progressive agenda. (And of course, we love to vouch for the good faith of the saints—McCain and Wallace and Schmidt and Wilkerson, This seems to be some type of flu spreading out from the Maddow program. What in the world makes us do this?) We e-mailed Blumenthal asking his sources on cries 2 and 3, but we haven’t received a reply. This leads us to ask a question—a question we asked when we read this piece at The Daily Beast. (Synopsis: “Does Sarah Palin suffer from narcissistic personality disorder? Michelle Goldberg puts America’s hottest author on the couch.”) Do we liberals deal in facts—and logic? Do we deal in winning argument? Or are we a gang of Heathers now? In the last decade, the mainstream press corps behaved like Heathers, jeering our leaders, inventing facts—even offering psychiatric assessments of What Makes Someone Like Gore Lie So Much, Even When He Doesn’t Have To. (George Bush rode this shit to the White House.) This week, it was Goldberg playing the fool, using the very language of that past jeering decade. Sure enough! The Doctor Was IN again this week. But this week, The Doctor Was IN over at Tina Brown’s site. Goldberg seems to have bungled her facts as she postured and played the shrink. But her formats come straight from the Clinton-Gore years. Say good-bye to the mainstream press! Are we the Heathers now?

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• 20 Nov 2009 02:46

  WHERE THE GIRLS ARE! A troubling thought came to mind as we scanned Sarah Palin’s new book: THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2009 Kristof knows history: Nicholas Kristof’s column today does suffer from one key omission. That said, the gent recalls important history as he starts his piece KRISTOF (11/18/09): Critics storm that health care reform is “a cruel hoax and a delusion.” Ads in 100 newspapers thunder that reform would mean “the beginning of socialized medicine.” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page predicts that the legislation will lead to “deteriorating service.” Business groups warn that Washington bureaucrats will invade “the privacy of the examination room,” that we are on the road to rationed care and that patients will lose the “freedom to choose their own doctor.” All dire—but also wrong. Those forecasts date not from this year, but from the battle over Medicare in the early 1960s. I pulled them from newspaper archives and other accounts. Yet this year those same accusations are being recycled in an attempt to discredit the health reform proposals now before Congress. Kristof recalls a lot of history in his column—the history of disinformation about American health care. The Interests have always peddled this type of shrieking disinfo. And of course, as Kristof notes, they’ve “recycled” similar notions this year. Last week, Ruth Marcus was shocked—just thoroughly shocked—to see disinformation on the floor of the House (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 11/13/09). But the disinformation of which Kristof speaks has been peddled to the American public down through the annals of time. It helps explain why it’s still so hard to sell health reform, despite the groaning state of the American health care “system.” We had two reactions to Kristof’s column: First reaction: We were saddened by the omission of Ronald Reagan. Perhaps it was a bridge too far for Kristof, who remains a Serious Person. But Reagan is the best known conservative of the past half century—and back in real time, he made shrieking, utterly ludicrous predictions about the dire effects Medicare would surely have. (For Jonathan Chait’s review of this matter, just click here.) Despite his fame and gong-show predictions, Reagan is absent from Kristof’s column. We wish he’d been included. Second reaction: We’re always struck by how long disinformation campaigns can persist without any real attempt at rebuttal by the liberal world. Why are these types of complaints still effective today? Because the liberal world has been so inept at fashioning counter-messaging. Example: Very few voters have ever heard the ludicrous predictions Reagan made. That’s because the liberal world has never had the first idea how to fashion political movements: How to spread information, potent messaging, frameworks for understanding. On the other hand: Is it possible that the liberal world just doesn’t care enough to do these sorts of thing? Doesn’t care enough to build winning messages? Doesn’t want to embarrass Saint Ronnie? Would rather talk about total trivia? Would rather discuss Carrie Prejean? Tomorrow, we’ll look at Gail Collins’ column, which appears right across from Kristof’s piece. In it, a major “liberal” talks about health care. Our advice? Avert your gaze WHERE THE GIRLS ARE: Sarah Palin may well have been the worst candidate in presidential/vice presidential history. She was grossly unprepared to discuss national issues. She misrepresented her Alaska career in ways which set new world records. That said, all good pseudo-liberals know what to say when asked about Palin’s vile new book. Palin’s a mean girl, we know we must say, using oddly gender-tinged language even as we complain about Newsweek’s sexist new cover. After that, we feign indignation about Palin’s assaults on the “little people” in McCain’s campaign. In particular, we shed big tears over poor Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace. We boo-hoo about their mistreatment. Rachel Maddow—current press agent for Colin Powell and the sainted Col. Wilkerson—of course assigned herself the task of acting as Wallace’s beard this week. (Partial transcript below.) Could we be dumber? the analysts asked. Sadly, we gave this response: We’ve met the mean girls—and they are us! Our view only strengthened yesterday afternoon, when we read the chapter in Palin’s book about Campaign 08. Boo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo! Pseudo-liberals are shedding big tears about Palin’s mistreatment of Wallace and Schmidt. For ourselves, we had a rather different reaction to that part of the mean girl’s book. Tone of the book: Sorry. We didn’t think the tone of Palin’s book was especially “mean.” Palin does describe the various events of the 2008 campaign. In most cases, there’s no way to know how accurate her accounts may be; this is true of all such inside-account books, of course. It’s fairly clear that she isn’t the biggest fan of Schmidt or Wallace, although says also many complimentary things about them. Our reaction? Pseudo-liberals should go off and enjoy a good solid cry—and then, they ought to get over it. At the end of Campaign 08, unnamed advisers in McCain’s campaign trashed Palin rather hard in the press. (Some of this happened during the campaign.) There’s no earthly reason why she shouldn’t give her own account of these events. In this morning’s New York Times, for example, the stylist assigned to buy Palin’s convention wardrobe finally describes those events, on the record (just click here)—and she backs Palin’s account of what happened, implicitly disagreeing with some of the screeching (anonymous) complaints from inside McCain’s campaign. None of these utterly pointless matters were ever worth talking about, of course. But you know us pseudo-liberals! We’ve long complained that Democrats like Al Gore didn’t defend themselves strongly enough. Sure enough! When a Republican stands to defend herself, we also complain about that! Correcting Salon: Really? Palin is the “mean girl” here? We saw Joan Walsh reciting that point last night—after her own printed that ludicrous critique of Palin’s book, a critique which was offered by a writer who hadn’t yet seen the book in question! In , Thomas Rogers mocked Palin’s account of “the phone call from McCain, when he offered her a place on his ticket” (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 11/18/09). But uh-oh! Reading Palin’s actual book, we saw that she was describing a different phone call altogether—the phone call in which McCain asked her to come to Arizona to interview for the possible job. Let’s get clear: Salon lets people “fact-check” books they haven’t even seen. They trash the author for “bizarre passages” which they completely misconstrue. But Palin is the “mean girl” here! So we pseudo-libs figure. By the way: As you observe this hapless behavior, do you start to understand why the liberal world is such a yowling mess—why nothing resembling a progressive politics has ever been built in your nation? A few things sounded quite credible: For the most part, there’s no way to know how accurate Palin’s various accounts may be. But several parts of her book did sound remarkably true to life. Two examples: Her account of Katie Couric’s constant interruptions reminded us of Couric’s hapless interview with Non-Candidate Gore in November 2002—the interview Frank Rich dishonestly transformed into a testimony to Gore’s lack of character. Couric kept interrupting Gore as he tried to answer her question about what the U.S. should so in Iraq (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 11/25/02). Palin describes something quite similar. Second example: Palin’s accounts of back-stabbing, self-dealing campaign aides also rang a bell. We were reminded of something we were told years ago by a major journalist in a position to know: The initial attacks on Naomi Wolf in the fall of 1999 came from rival staffers inside Gore’s campaign, not from the RNC, we were told. It was these staffers, we were told, who mailed around the “dirty parts” of Wolf’s (outstanding) books, hoping to undermine Wolf as a rival for Gore’s attention. This conduct was loathsome, of course; given the mayhem these staffers helped create, they plainly helped send Bush to the White House. Our question: What on earth would make liberals think that Republican staffers are more moral, more decorous, more morally pure, more dignified, more discreet? By now, Maddow has become press agent for a wide array of people who helped take the U.S. to Iraq. Watching her vouch for Wallace on Tuesday night, the analysts bellowed and yowled. Down toward the trivia-in-themselves: As we’ve noted, Palin was a horrible candidate. In our view, she remains a person with very poor judgment about the nation’s problems. But inside the pseudo-liberal world, this week has brought a set of screeching complaints about all manner of pointless trivia—including complaints by “book reviewers” who haven’t seen the book they’re critiquing! Can we talk? We’re small, and we’re dumb, and we love to talk trivia! Put another way: We’ve met the mean girls—and they are us! We wouldn’t know how to build a progressive politics if it hit us over the head. Given the gruesome state of our health care system, how can it be that we’ve done so poorly in this year’s hunt for health reform? Can it be because we’re the mean girls here? Because we’re too dumb to play this game? Too undisciplined? Too self-involved? Too easy for The Interests to roll? Bonus—Wallace’s agent: What actually happened between Palin and Wallace? Like you, we have no real way of knowing. Nor do we especially care—though we didn’t find the tone of Palin’s book to be especially “mean.” Nor do we have any view about Nicolle Wallace as a person—although she did fight long and hard to help Bush destroy the known world. Today, though, you can forget about that! Wallace has a new press agent! Here she is, on her Tuesday night program, adding Wallace to the sanctified Powell and Wilkerson, her previous list of clients: MADDOW (11/17/09): Nicole Wallace was a senior adviser to the McCain-Palin campaign. For her trouble, Nicole Wallace has been on the business end of a lot of retrospective sliming by Sarah Palin. Ms. Wallace spoke to our show, going on the record, to de-slime herself and to try to set the record straight. It is well worth a listen. But how could Maddow possibly know if Wallace was “setting the record straight?” Meanwhile, avert your gaze at Maddow’s hapless first question to her expert guest, Ana Marie Cox. Good lord, the analysts sadly cried. Could our side get any dumber? We didn’t know quite what to tell the young scholars. But we’ve had funny thoughts this week about where the “mean girls” are.

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• 18 Nov 2009 12:37

  DROWNING IN DUMB! Your nation may truly be dying of dumb. We’d blame it on Palin—and KO: WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2009 Ruminations on Stupak: For our money, the most interesting cable segment last night was the Hardball segment with Rep. Bart Stupak, he of the Stupak-Pitts amendment. How might the current battle over Stupak-Pitts be resolved without killing health reform? As usual, host Chris Matthews wasn’t able to craft a fully coherent discussion. But in these remarks, Stupak defined his own view of where this matter leads: MATTHEWS (11/17/09): Is there anyone on the Budget Committee or the Health—the Finance Committee staff or Ways or Means staff that’s trying to figure out some new way to compromise here? That would achieve the goal of health care reform and maintain the status quo [regarding abortion issues]? Is anybody working on that now? Or is it just a battle between your side and the other side? STUPAK: No, no. a couple of senators and I, we talked today, and trying to see if there’s some common language. Here’s my amendment—they had my amendment. Well, what is wrong with it? Where do you think the—for the pro-choice people, they say it’s over-broad. Where is it? It`s the Hyde language, it’s not over-broad. Everyone agrees, but do we have to put a line in there that says, “Look, you can still have public—you can private funding for abortion?” I mean, my amendment says that. But if you want a clarification, we`re willing to put that in there. We are not restricting insurance policies or individuals from using their own money to get abortion service. MATTHEWS: Would you be open to an amendment to the bill that comes out of conference that says, even though no federal spending will go for abortion to support, to subsidize a policy which covers abortion, that insurance companies that now provide that kind of coverage to private customers must continue to offer it? Would you be open to that language? STUPAK: As long as they pay for that policy 100 percent out of their pocket, I have no problem with that language. MATTHEWS: So you wouldn’t mind mandating that so they couldn’t stop offering that coverage? STUPAK: The law is very clear right now. Insurance companies can offer that benefit all they want. They can offer the abortion coverage all they want. Just don`t ask us to pay for it. Just don’t ask the federal government to pay for it. The majority of Americans agree with us. Don’t use our federal tax dollars. But insurance companies can provide it. There’s no—we’re not restricting them from providing abortion coverage. Just don’t use our money to pay for it. It has been difficult to follow this issue, in part because our biggest news orgs have made so little attempt to explain it. (The New York Times has completely taken a pass.) Meanwhile, our liberal cable “news” programs have tended to go straight to pro-choice positioning, by-passing any serious attempt to explain the (complex) facts. There has been one other problem. Pro-choice groups have been driving their position with what may be the silliest talking-point we’ve ever seen in politics. There it was again last Friday in a letter to the New York Times, which otherwise has made so little attempt to discuss this matter at all: LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (11/13/09): What irony: even as the House voted to expand access to health insurance, it undermined the health of millions of women. The Stupak-Pitts amendment effectively denies many women access to abortion—a safe, legal medical procedure that one in three women will need in her lifetime. As for claims that women could buy an abortion rider, no woman anticipates an unplanned or unhealthy pregnancy. In my abortion clinic in Seattle, I saw many women who needed abortions because something was seriously wrong with the fetus, or their health was compromised by pregnancy. Where will these women turn if Congress denies them coverage? Suzanne T. Poppema Chairwoman, Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health Edmonds, Wash., Nov. 9, 2009 Truly, that highlighted claim may be the most unintelligent talking-point we’ve ever seen in politics. Health insurance is all about “anticipating” events you don’t “plan.” You buy insurance because you know that unplanned events may occur. But so what? This talking-point has been in wide use for the past several months now. Big news orgs are sitting this topic out; pro-choice groups offer claims like that. In each case, we’d have to say the public interest is being short-changed—insulted. Dems and Reps agree on one point. Each group says it only wants to maintain the status quo regarding funding. We liberals sometimes like to pretend otherwise, but that status quo has long involved large, sweeping prohibitions on the use of federal money to pay for abortion. If we were king, that wouldn’t be our own policy choice. But that is the status quo—and the vast majority of liberals have always accepted it. Tell us when you ever saw a liberal (or Democratic) group argue that Medicaid should pay for abortion—that the federal employees health insurance plan should include abortion coverage. In our view, the mainstream press has taken a hike on this topic; liberals have tended to do the same, refusing to acknowledge the extent to which we have always agreed to restrictions on funding. Last night, Stupak said a deal can be reached; so did Sen. Ron Wyden, on Countdown. We can only hope that the pair are right. It seems we rubes will be kept in the dark about the real shape of this issue. An intriguing point from MacGillis: On Sunday, the Washington Post at least provided a full attempt at reporting this topic. As leading liberals shriek and posture about our commitment to funding and choice, it might be worth pondering this point: MACGILLIS (11/15/09): What does [Stupak-Pitts] mean for women? For women who do not have health insurance, gaining subsidized coverage will mean they will be much better off overall, while still lacking abortion coverage. But there are many women who now have coverage on the individual market that is overpriced and low-quality but does cover abortion. Their subsidized coverage under the legislation will be superior in general, but they will lose their abortion coverage, unless they buy a rider. Abortion opponents note this outcome is no different than when Democrats now push to expand Medicaid in the 33 states without abortion coverage. Under the proposed Democratic bills, many more women would get coverage under Medicaid. By long-standing, pre-existing agreement, they would therefore not be covered for abortion. When you see Democratic solons swearing about their commitment to funding, just remember that these same people built this into their plan. We’re not saying they were wrong to do so. But we would suggest that some Dem pols are being a bit disingenuous. In our view, big mainstream news orgs are ducking this topic—and you’re getting played by some pols. DROWNING IN DUMB: Maureen Dowd and Sarah Palin have a lot in common. We learn about these similarities in Dowd’s latest novel/column, which she typed for today’s New York Times after reading Palin’s new book. How are Dowd and Palin alike? “We both read ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,’” Dowd writes. “We both came from families that loved Ronald Reagan.” Dowd is many years older, of course. But culturally, the pair share a tie. Dowd is also like Keith Olbermann. The pair enjoy writing novelized versions of events, even where there is no sign that they could possibly know what is true. And they love wasting your time on consummate trivia. Here is Dowd’s novel this morning: DOWD (11/18/09): I must be somewhat American because I agreed with Palin that she was undercut by Nicolle Wallace, one of the aides sent by John McCain to do the ''My Fair Lady'' makeover. Wallace had had a contract at CBS News and was determined to get the big interview for Katie Couric, even if it meant leading the lamb to slaughter, telling Palin that ''the Perky One,'' as Palin called Couric, was insecure (presumably because of her low ratings) and that she would do a short-and-sweet chat about balancing motherhood and a career. But Palin should have been smart enough to know that Couric has had a reputation for decades for being a tough interviewer, and that she wasn't going to whiff on a chance like that. According to Dowd, Nicolle Wallace “undercut” Palin. Because Wallace once had a contract at CBS, she“was determined to get the big interview for Katie Couric, even if it meant leading the lamb to slaughter.” Question: Does anyone have the slightest idea why Dowd thinks she knows these things? As written, this is simply a novel, tricked up as pseudo-journalism. Dowd has crawled inside Wallace’s head to offer this version of a trivial event. In truth, this event ain’t worth discussing. But Dowd doesn’t show the slightest sign of knowing what really occurred. Of course, Dowd is dumb, irresponsible, unbalanced; she should have been canned many years in the past. Unfortunately, an astonishing fact has become clear: Keith Olbermann is even dumber than Dowd—even less emotionally balanced. In the last two nights, he and his running-mate, Rachel Maddow, have fed us the equal-but-opposite novel about this utterly pointless Wallace matter. KO has shrieked and howled at the moon about all manner of Palin trivia, rarely showing the slightest sign of knowing what would count as evidence for his various pleasing claims. On Monday, he seemed to vouch for various McCain aides (including Wallace) who have challenged things Palin has said. Regarding Wallace, he can’t possibly know hat happened either. But he knows which side he’s on. When it comers to Palin and Wallace, how could Olbermann possibly know whose account is more accurate? In truth, he simply doesn’t. This big unintelligent emotional mess is feeding young liberals his own tortured novels. But by now, Olbermann feeds on the brains of young liberals as Dracula would have fed on their throats. Your nation is currently downing in dumb. In the past few days, pseudo-liberal and mainstream reaction to Palin’s book shows you the depth of our problem. Let’s start with the AP’s inept attempt to “fact-check” the book, a groaning effort which was—alas and alack—even presented at Salon. The AP’s piece was written by Calvin Woodward, whose ineptitude has stunned us here since his days of hunting down Candidate Gore in 1999. That said: Even by Woodward’s woeful professional standards, his attempt to fact-check Palin’s book is a true journalistic mess. Below, we see the very first item in his fact-check—the very first topic he mentions in his synopsis of his report. Can we really not see the problems with the man’s work? PALIN: Says she made frugality a point when traveling on state business as Alaska governor, asking "only" for reasonably priced rooms and not "often" going for the "high-end, robe-and-slippers" hotels. THE FACTS: Although travel records indicate she usually opted for less-pricey hotels while governor, Palin and daughter Bristol stayed five days and four nights at the $707.29-per-night Essex House luxury hotel (robes and slippers come standard) overlooking New York City's Central Park for a five-hour women's leadership conference in October 2007. With air fare, the cost to Alaska was well over $3,000. Event organizers said Palin asked if she could bring her daughter. The governor billed her state more than $20,000 for her children's travel, including to events where they had not been invited, and in some cases later amended expense reports to specify that they had been on official business. Classic Woodward! All through his groaning fact-check, he paraphrases what Palin has said, before proceeding to his critique. It is thus impossible for his reader to know what Palin has actually said. Beyond that, as in this passage, his recitation of THE FACTS often tends to support the things Palin has allegedly said. In this example, can liberal readers not see that Woodward’s account of THE FACTS agrees with what Palin supposedly said about not “often” going for the “high-end, robe and slippers” hotels? It may be that Palin’s alleged statement about frugality is contradicted by the cost of her children’s travel, though Woodward fails to quote that statement. But some of his FACTS support what Palin is alleged to have said, and some of his FACTS are simply irrelevant. What is the relevance of these FACTS, for instance: “Event organizers said Palin asked if she could bring her daughter.” Palin sometimes took her kids “to events where they had not been invited.” Woodward offers a dozen fact-checks; almost all are substantially flawed, due to his familiar journalistic ineptitude. But then, there’s a lot of ineptitude in the liberal world too. Consider what happened when Salon attempted to assess Palin’s book for itself. Alas! After wasting his time with silly clatter about Palin being a “mean girl,” Thomas Rogers finally tried to put some meat on his critique’s bones. But good lord—is this the best we liberals can manage? Discussing Palin’s “bloopers” and “bizarre passages,” Rogers started with this perfect nonsense: ROGERS (11/17/09): [I]f she does enter political life again, the book has a litany of blurbs and bloopers she'll have to live down. Many media outlets have combed through the book to extract some of its most noteworthy or bizarre passages. Among the best that have popped up: On the phone call from McCain, when he offered her a place on his ticket: "For some reason, when the call came at the State Fair, it didn't come as a huge shock ... I certainly didn't think, Well, of course this would happen. But neither did I think, What an astonishing idea.” According to our weak liberal minds, that seems to be the most strikingly “noteworthy or bizarre passage” a Candidate Palin would “have to live down” in the future. But can explain why that is? By the time McCain made that phone call, Palin had been mentioned as a possible VP nominee for months—and she’d been personally interviewed for the post by McCain himself! Why on earth would she be shocked or astonished when McCain finally offered the gig? This passage makes no earthly sense—but it’s good enough to serve as Palin’s leading “blooper” in a piece designed for us weak-minded liberals. You see, we liberals love to hate. Any excuse, no matter how weak, is taken as food for the soul. (Rogers goes on to vouch the for Woodward’s fact-check. As you can see, he immediately misreports the item about the hotel.) It has been sad to watch shrieking liberals killing the pig when it comes to Palin’s new book. If you want to know why there’s nothing resembling a progressive politics in your country, just review the empty calories on which we liberals are happy to feed. Of course, no one has played the fool like Olbermann, who even returned to his strings of dick jokes about “tea-baggers” on last evening’s program. Olbermann is one of the most emotionally unbalanced people we’ve ever seen on TV. (In the last two nights, he has made Sean Hannity seem, by contrast, like the newest Mensa head.) Last night, this most unbalanced of cable “news” clowns returned to a string of his beloved dick jokes—as he kept saying how “clueless” the other side is on such matters! Republicans made me tell these jokes, this least mature of all known humans said: OLBERMANN (11/17/09): The Republicans have, for many months now, put on a pedestal a hard-right group whose name unintentionally evokes an action that cannot be described on television. In our number-one story in the countdown, the GOP has now, with a little help from us, officially co-opted the word "tea-bagger." It is runner-up for [the Oxford Dictionary’s] word of the year. It was Republicans who embraced tea bags as their symbol with tax day protests of President Obama’s agenda. And it was Republicans who cluelessly referred to tea-bagging as if it had no prior meaning. It was they who openly used the phrase that begged for double entendres. The Republican talking heads like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich have pushed their own vision of tea-bagging [1] down the throats of the original tea-baggers who were in fact libertarian supporters of Ron Paul. Cincinnati tea-baggers got a [2] Boehner endorsement from the House Minority leader. And the nation`s tea-bagging, of course, impossible without this man, [3] a “dick army,” at the head of it. "Tea-bagger" used as a noun was the natural result. It just goes to show you, if you use the word tea-bagger over and over, it swiftly takes on a brand-new meaning, somehow. There was more, but let’s quit there. For the record, “double entendre” is a French term which means, in this context, “I’m a simmering mess.” “Down the throats,” “[boner] endorsement” and “dick army” were all lovingly offered to viewers—forced from Olbermann by the Republicans. But then, Olbermann is the most unbalanced gender-nut we’ve ever seen on TV. His open misogyny has been a disgrace for years—though the “liberal” world has politely accepted it. He weeps and moans about mommy’s death, then returns with joy to his favorite jokes and his sneering assaults on young women. Meanwhile, his own “fact checking” of Palin’s book has been a world-class study in dumb. In these ways, Olbermann eats the brains of the liberal young. And your nation keeps dying of dumb. Your nation is in a world of hurt; your nation seems to be dying of dumb. Palin has been one part of this problem. As he swallows the brains of the young, Olbermann is a bigger problem by far. Return of a corporate hack: By the way, Richard Wolffe is back on Countdown, offering inane agreement with Keith on a regular basis. Months ago, Wolffe was thrown off the air due to his status as a corporate lobbyist, as recorded by Glenn Greenwald. (“Having Richard Wolffe host an MSNBC program—or serving as an almost daily ‘political analyst’—is exactly tantamount to MSNBC's just turning over an hour every night to a corporate lobbyist.” For Greenwald’s full critique, click here.) Now, the fatuous fellow is back. But readers! That’s entertainment! By the way: Dan Bartlett, Wolffe’s owner at Public Strategies, was one of the biggest cogs in Candidate Bush’s message machine. In the fall of 2000, he’s the guy who sold the ludicrous “doggy pill” crap to the Boston Globe. Candidate Gore was thus transformed into a LIAR again; his ten-point lead in the polls disappeared. George Bush ended up in the White House. Wolffe now makes his cash from Bartlett—and he caddies for KO’s clowning. In the process, the brains of young liberals are getting devoured—and your nation keeps dying of dumb. Who’s stupak now: Olbermann, last night. What a shock: OLBERMANN: You mentioned the Stupak Amendment. I couldn’t believe it was possible it was going to pass in the House. Do you think it’s plausible that Republicans and enough Democrats would get a similar thing, a Hatch amendment tacked on to this bill in the Senate? What a shocker: Olbermann didn’t understand our politics! Perhaps if he’d stop insulting voters, telling dick jokes, and kicking the sh*t out of young blonde women who share Obama’s view on marriage, he might join the land of the living. Our advice: Don’t hold your breath. This man is a lingering mess.

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• 17 Nov 2009 20:03

  WE’RE WITH STUPAK! Stupak got famous two weekends ago. The Times still hasn’t explained it: TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2009 The way our (sports) pundits reason: An NFL coaching decision has been widely debated this week. As we’ve watched sports pundits discuss this decision, we’ve been struck—and saddened—by the way many have reasoned. More specifically, we’ve groaned to see the way their work has resembled that of their political colleagues. We’ve always thought that American sports writers were a bit brighter than our political “journalists.” No such luck, it now seems. The decision in question was made by Bill Belichick, coach of the New England Patriots. In their debates, sports pundits have displayed three traits we’ve often observed among their political brethren: Undying love of conventional wisdom: Many sports pundits have seemed genuinely angry about the fact that Belichick did something unconventional. (Trent Dilfer, come on down! And take your meds!) In political journalism, the pundit class is often happiest when They All Get To Say The Same Thing. In this case, many sports pundits came unhinged because one of the NFL’s coaches didn’t do The Thoroughly Typical Thing.This reaction seemed quite familiar. The instant recourse to mind-reading: Many sports pundits instantly turned to mind-reading, thus “explaining” the motive behind Belichick’s unconventional move. (Kill the pig! For one especially foolish example, just click here.) Of course, this is also a common, numb-nutted approach among our political pundits. The inability to conduct an analysis: Finally, we were struck by how weakly many sports pundits were able to reason about Belichick’s decision. They complained that he didn’t do the conventional thing—and then, they began explaining his motives. But had he done the smart thing—made the right decision? Many pundits showed no sign of knowing how to approach such a question. To them, Belichick’s decision was unusual. Automatically, this made it wrong. Did Belichick make the right decision—presumably, the decision which gave him the best chance to win? Given the fact that he was playing Peyton Manning on the road, we would guess that he probably did. (Note: Once the Patriots got to fourth down, there was a good chance they would lose no matter what they did. Many sports pundits showed no sign of grasping this basic fact. We’d guess that Belichick did.) If Belichick had decided to punt, could he have kept Manning out of the end zone? Possibly—but what were the odds? In this morning’s New York Times, a computer study judges that Belichick took the better approach, by a narrow margin. Our reaction? Someone should bang that computer, hard! The computer says this: Had Belichick punted, the odds were 75.7 percent that Manning wouldn’t have reached the end zone. Does anyone think the Patriots had that good a chance to deny him? Back to our central point: Despite the propaganda we constantly churn about our stunning rationality, we humans tend to reason quite poorly. For decades, the political press corps has taken delight in demonstrating this awkward fact about our chimp-like tendencies. They reciting conventional wisdom, no matter how blatantly foolish it is. They love to mind-read peoples’ motives. And they’re often very weak at performing real analysis. This week, many sports pundits followed suit. They descended to the level of the political press.!We were sad to see that occur. We always thought the nation’s sports scribes were smarter than the hacks. When they were good: In 1998, we noted a groaning fact. A major sports writer had been quite careful in quoting Michael Jordan, even as NBC’s Lisa Myers was doctoring all sorts of quotes concerning the Clintons. But what the heck! It was only impeachment! To see the political press corps clown as a sports colleague played by the rules, see THE DAILY HOWLER, 5/22/98. (Earlier, see THE DAILY HOWLER, 5/12/98.) Michael Wilbon was careful in his (sports) work. Lisa Myers was out spreading mayhem. WE’RE WITH STUPAK: It’s possible that the current attempt at health reform will fail over issues concerning abortion. The Stupak-Pitts amendment to the recently-passed House bill remains the focal point of contention surrounding this ongoing matter. Stupak-Pitts came center stage on Saturday, November 7, during final wrangling in the House about the bill. (The bill, containing Stupak-Pitts, passed in the House that night.) But what would the Stupak-Pitts amendment do? Heaven help any New York Times reader who would like to find out! In the ten days since Stupak-Pitts became famous, the New York Times has made no attempt to explain, in its hard-copy editions, what the famous amendment does. And this morning, matters only got worse! This morning, the Times let the intrepid Katherine “Kit” Seelye take a crack at explaining Stupak-Pitts. (Although she never mentions the amendment by name in her short report.) Seelye tackles Stupak! For readers of our greatest newspaper, this represents the journalistic equivalent of a slow, painful, agonized death. Seelye starts by describing a new TV ad by supporters of abortion rights—an ad which takes place in a comedy club. But before Seelye’s editor could get out the hook, the scribe had tried to explain what Stupak-Pitts would do. (For a slightly altered version of Seelye’s piece, just click here What follows is the first attempt to explain Stupak-Pitts in the New York Times’ hard-copy edition—the paper’s first attempt in the ten days since the measure got famous. (Sources: Nexis archives, and the Times’ own “Times in Print” archive.) In the second paragraph we present, Seelye explains what Stupak-Pitts would ban. Do understand what she has written? We’ll admit to being kerflubbled by the passage we highlight: SEELYE (11/17/09): The commercial, to run beginning Tuesday on cable stations in Washington, is one of several actions by abortion-rights activists in recent days urging the Senate to exclude an anti-abortion measure approved by the House. The House measure would ban insurance coverage for abortions for women receiving federal subsidies under a health-care overhaul and for those who are part of a government-run insurance plan. It could also have the effect of curtailing the availability of abortion coverage for others, even those paying for the insurance with their own money, because if one person in a plan was receiving a federal subsidy, no one else in that plan could receive abortion coverage. We think we understand some of what Seelye has written: Under Stupak-Pitts, a woman couldn’t buy an insurance plan which covered abortion if she was getting a federal subsidy to help pay the cost of the policy. In addition, the reform plan’s “government-run insurance plan”—the so-called “public option”—wouldn’t offer abortion coverage. If a woman purchased the government-run/public plan, she wouldn’t be getting abortion coverage. We think we understand that much. That seems to comport with what we’ve read about Stupak-Pitts in other locations. But after that, things get hazy. According to Seelye, Stupak-Pitts could also “have the effect of curtailing the availability of abortion coverage for others, even those paying for the insurance with their own money, because if one person in a plan was receiving a federal subsidy, no one else in that plan could receive abortion coverage.” We’ll be candid: We simply don’t know what that means. We aren’t even sure what kind of “plan” Seelye refers to here. We don’t know what Seelye means. And we’ve tried to figure it out—oh lord, how we’ve tried! In part, we’ve tried to compare what Seelye writes to a full-blown attempt in the Washington Post to explain what Stupak-Pitts would do. This full-length report, by Alec MacGillis, appeared in Sunday’s Post (just click here). We are even a bit unclear about some of what MacGillis says. But his report does represent a formal attempt to explain the Stupak-Pitts amendment—the kind of effort the New York Times still hasn’t bothered to make in its hard-copy editions. (For a longer blog post by Seelye in the Times, just click this.) It has now been ten days since Stupak-Pitts came center stage in our health care debate. Amazingly, the New York Times still hasn’t tried to explain it. For the record: In this morning’s hard-copy Times, Seelye’s report lies directly above an equally incoherent report by another scribe—an equally incoherent attempt to explain a separate health reform issue. I’m with Stupid, tee-shirts say at the beach. We thought of those shirts as Seelye clued us on Stupak this morning. We’re all with Stupak, the analysts cried, ruminating on this murky debate. We’ve been with Stupak for ten days now. The Times still hasn’t explained it. Tomorrow: What MacGillis said.

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• 16 Nov 2009 13:02

  MEET THE VAN WINKLES! A second Van Winkle emerged at the Post—enabled by your favorite liberals: MONDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2009 The Washington Post gets it right: Three cheers for eighth-grader Smar Abuagla, and for the Washington Post’s Tara Bahrampour! In yesterday’s paper, Bahrampour offered a superb profile of Abuagla, focusing on her decision to start wearing a head scarf to her Reston, Virginia public school. Abuagla’s an American teen born in the Sudan. Do you remember being 13? For an excellent reminder, you know what to do: Just click here Leg or breast? Or perhaps culture war: The thing to remember about Howard Kurtz is this: He isn’t dumb—he’s not dumb at all. What happened on yesterday’s Reliable Sources was, therefore, an example of pure craven posing. (To read the full transcript, click here Midway through the hour-long program, Kurtz introduced the latest sleep-inducing discussion of Sarah Palin’s new book. His questions were utterly tedious—as were his three pundit guests. No one had a thing to say about this utterly tedious topic—except when Kurtz raised the question of Newsweek’s current cover photo (click this), which invites you to take a long look at Palin’s sexy-time legs. He spoke with Amanda Carpenter: KURTZ (11/15/09): Newsweek cover out today. Let's put it up on the screen: "How do you solve a problem like Sarah?" And look at that picture of her. I don't know where they got that from. With all of the media criticism in the book, and in light of that Newsweek cover, is she getting and will she get a fair shake from the news business? CARPENTER: I don't think she is right. I mean, I saw that cover published by Newsweek, it's coming out in their November 23rd edition. It was a photo taken from Runners World where it makes sense to show someone with their legs. And there were other poses where she is not showing her legs. But they chose that one. Why did Newsweek choose the sexy-time photo? Might we offer a guess? For obvious reasons, the fellows at Newsweek (Meacham and Thomas) can’t get people to purchase their written material—so they turn to sexy-time photos! Pious fellows like Meacham have always made such decisions. And they always will. Back to Reliable Sources. The discussion of Palin was utterly dull, driven by a trio of pundits with absolutely nothing to say. (They know a few Standard Bromides.) But Palin is a major political figure, someone who might actually run for the White House. What explains where Kurtz went next? Fight for consciousness as he concludes his snoresome discussion of Palin: KURTZ: There was a great e-mail the Huffington Post got written during the campaign by Palin. She initially didn't want to go on Saturday Night Live. You remember when she went on and appeared with Tina Fey. Those folks are whack. Even though it wasn't as bad as it was, she didn't like the portrayals naturally of her and her family. All right, let's talk about Carrie Prejean who kind of—it's almost like in the same category as Sarah Palin. She has a lot to say about the media. She, of course, is the former Miss California who ended up in a lawsuit with pageant officials who took away her title. She's been making the rounds and look at what Carrie Prejean has been saying to various interviewers. The discussion of Palin was utterly dull—but Palin’s a major political figure. By way of contrast, Carrie Prejean isn’t a major figure of any type, despite Kurtz’s claim that “it's almost like in the same category as Sarah Palin.” In fact, Prejean is a confection of cable “news” channels. She’s kept around so cable can run its tape of her in a swimsuit. Why was Kurtz discussing Prejean? Is there any chance he went there for the same reason that The Parson put that shot on his cover? Carrie Prejean important. She was competing in a pointless Trump event when she got a surprise question from one of Trump’s judges—a judge who is a professional idiot. In answering the question, she stated a view identical to Barack Obama’s (he’s currently president, of the US)—and she has been assailed by the pseudo-liberal world from that day forward. (She also got assailed as a “c*nt” by Trump’s idiot judge. Within the pseudo-liberal world, this was of course completely OK. You see, Prejean is The Other. She had revealed this fact herself—by expressing Obama’s view.) She important; she doesn’t matter; and this clown-time episode got its start when she stated Obama’s view. (And Hillary Clinton’s; and John Edwards’; and Biden’s; and Kerry’s; and Candidate Gore’s.) But we pseudo-liberals love culture war; we’ll grab any excuse to sustain it. It’s the way we arrange to lose votes—and to convince our own small minds that we belong to the good noble tribe. As opposed to the creatures we loathe—the beings we practice to hate. MEET THE VAN WINKLES: Last Wednesday, Ruth Van Winkle, also known as Ruth Marcus, seemed to awake from a long soothing sleep. In an excellent piece written decades decades too late, she noticed a fact of life on the planet: Republicans like to disinform voters about the state of health care. See THE DAILY HOWLER, 11/13/09. On Sunday, Kathleen Van Winkle (AKA Parker) also emerged from a warm cozy log. Like Marcus, she wrote in the Washington Post. Parker’s column, concerning the need for civility, also comes decades too late. In fairness, we don’t necessarily disagree with Parker’s call for greater civility. As she started, she sketched the “recent events and trends” which have her so concerned PARKER (11/15/09): Growing concern about incivility is one of America's more appealing trends. Increasingly, individuals and institutions are seeking to burnish the golden rule. The concern isn't new—Prof. P.M. Forni started the Johns Hopkins Civility Project 12 years ago and published a book in 2002: "Choosing Civility: The Twenty-Five Rules of Considerate Conduct.” [...] But recent events and trends—from rowdy town-hall meetings to sideshow rants on television to the outburst of South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson—have brought vague unease about manners into sharper focus. Parker mentions Wilson twice. But in which cozy log has the lady been sleeping if she thinks the events and trends in question are somehow “recent?” In fairness, Parker does know that incivility has plagued our politics before. “Americans have never been exemplars of manners in politics,” she quickly admits. But when she marshaled her examples, the analysts were permitted to laugh: PARKER: Americans have never been exemplars of manners in politics. Often cited are the anti-Federalists, though the Federalists were hardly rearranging the doilies. [...] During the Andrew Jackson-John Quincy Adams election of 1828, the former general was called a murderer and a cannibal; his wife was accused of being a harlot. Closer to Joe Wilson's stomping ground, politics has always been a blood sport, and most natives are proud of it. In the election of 1832, mobs assaulted candidates. Not very civil, that. How long has Parker been in her log? Searching her mind for previous examples of rudeness, she thinks of presidential elections—in 1828 and 1832! Did Parker intend to challenge her colleague, Marcus, for her newspaper’s Van Winkle Prize? We couldn’t help wondering when she let us know what has changed—since the doily arrangements of the 1830s, that is: PARKER (Nonetheless, something has changed—and what has changed is media. I don't mean traditional media, the so-called mainstream media everyone loves to hate these days. In fact, old media have strict standards about civility and appropriate language in the public sphere. Such concerns prevented me recently from publishing the obscenity uttered in The Post newsroom that provoked an editor to hit a writer. Most crucial in the viral growth of incivility are new media—the Internet, the blogosphere and all the social applications, from Facebook to Twitter, and whatever else may have developed since I began typing this page. In what log has Parker been lolling? She slams the Internet’s incivility—and she praises the “strict standards” of the “old media.” In the process, she forgets to name one other famous part of “new media”—conservative talk radio. Does anyone remember when Rush Limbaugh, on talk radio, rather flamboyantly spread the idea that Hillary Clinton, then first lady, was involved in the murder of Vince Foster? Frankly, this new Van Winkle doesn’t. She was asleep in her log. We’ve covered the following ground many times. But Parker’s column brought it to mind again—and it continues to define our misshapen public discourse. It was strange to see Parker return to 1832 in her search for incivility. If the Nexis archives can be believed, Parker was a regular columnist all through the Clinton/Gore years. (During much of that time she was a nationally syndicated columnist.) That said, she was discussing our politics during the years when these events occurred: The Clintons were accused of serial murders. Bill Clinton was assailed as a drug runner. Major “journalists” went on cable TV and laughed at photos of the younger, funny-looking Hillary Clinton. (Who was a giant lesbo, of course.) The press corps invented a string of fanciful tales, thus inventing AL GORE, LIAR. The press corps drove a smut-laden campaign against Naomi Wolf, who reminded them of Miss Lewinsky in a wide assortment of ways. Parker’s current patron, Chris Matthews, told the world that Gore “doesn’t seem very American even.” Who drove these examples of incivility? America’s most famous men of the cloth. America’s most famous talk radio hosts. And, of course, the mainstream press corps, which has “strict standards about civility in the public sphere.” Parker didn’t drive those campaigns herself, but she was a major columnist all through the relevant era. (In her first column of the Clinton era, she took Hillary Clinton’s side against those who were assailing her—like her own husband, for instance.) Yesterday, emerging from her log, she forgot that era’s history—was forced to return to 1828 to think of prior failings. Why do Marcus and Parker forget? Because the liberal world permits it. Many of your favorite, fiery liberals took part in the slander campaigns against Clinton, then Gore. The others pretended they didn’t notice, thus maintaining establishment standing as acceptably Serious People. And right to this day, the liberal world has kept its trap shut about the real history of the last decade. Polite boys and girls become Serious People—thus permitting the kind of forgetting which pervades the Parker piece. Nor have career liberals ever complained about decades of lying about health care. Fighting off narcolepsy themselves, they recite their defining pseudo-lib mantra: Must...be...Serious People... Marcus seemed to be surprised when she saw Republicans lie about health care. Parker had to journey in time to think of earlier incivility. You have the liberal world to thank for this nonsense—for this parade of Van Winkles. Tromorrow, we’ll invite you to sneer at the liberal world as it too plays a bit of Van Winkle—this time, concerning abortion. Our own recollections seem to be challenged when this topic is forced into view.

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• 13 Nov 2009 20:10

  THE RISE OF RUTH VAN WINKLE! Ruth Marcus emerged from a long cozy nap—and spotted “a GOP blizzard:” FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2009 Stupak is different/The Other: Where will Stupak-Pitts end up? Like you, we have no idea. Could this issue sink health reform? Given the narrow voting margins which seem to exist, we’d have to assume that it could. For ourselves, we think pro-choice groups have every right to bail on the bill if they decide it ends up affecting choice in unacceptable ways. But then, we also think that anti-abortion groups have the right to make the same sort of decision. That is, to jump ahead just a bit: We assume that different people, acting in good faith, may judge the morality of a measure in different ways. Stupak’s views are different from ours. But we don’t assume he’s The Other. How do you feel about those people whose moral judgements are different from yours? Do you rush to make them The Other? To our ear, that’s what Olbermann and Maddow did in a highly instructive colloquy on last evening’s Countdown Their discussion came right after KO’s first Prejean tease. So you knew it was highly important! Sometimes the analysts simply “slap five” in enjoyment of KO’s cluelessness. Such a moment arrived fairly quickly last might, before he brought on Maddow. Here’s the whole chunk: OLBERMANN (11/12/09): Good evening, from New York. A strategy that is proving to have the most potential yet to defeat health care reform, one that might tear the Democratic caucus apart in the House —a strategy that seeks to deny women access to a specific medical procedure that is not illegal—just ask the Supreme Court. Our fifth story on the countdown: Have the Republicans finally figured out how to bring down the health care bill? No, they have not. But a Democratic congressman is doing this to his own party while claiming that he is the one who is being double-crossed: Mr. Bart Stupak of the Michigan 1st [district]—the Stupak behind the Stupak Amendment. It would prohibit any government-run insurance plan created by the health care bill from covering abortion as well as prohibiting anyone receiving credits to purchase private insurance from purchasing the policy that had abortion coverage in it. As you might expect, women’s rights groups enraged to learn that the House bill passed last weekend has such an amendment in it. Administration officials, including the White House chief of staff, Mr. Emanuel, are meeting with the head of the National Organization of Women in an attempt to smooth things over. The president’s aides will also be meeting with faith groups as health care negotiations continue. Mr. Stupak, himself, is now issuing threats about the course of those negotiations while claiming his threats are not threats. The congressman telling LifeNews.com, “The other side is playing with fire. If they`re going to summarily dismiss us by taking the pen to that language, there will be hell to pay. I don`t say it as a threat, but if they double-cross us, there will be 40 people who won’t vote with them the next time they need us and that could be the final version of this bill.” Double-cross? To which party does Mr. Stupak think he belongs? Right there on page 50 of the 2008 Democratic Party platform: The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to choose a safe and legal abortion, and regardless of ability to pay, and we oppose any and all efforts to weaken and undermine that right. Olbermann was doing his best to reinvent Stupak as The Other—feigning outrage over silly points of language and asking which party he thinks he’s in. But good lord! The analysts simply hung their heads when KO quoted that platform language! As everyone but entertainers will know, the two party platforms often contain language which is honored wholly in the breach—and this is a perfect example. You can forget what it says, or seems to suggest, in that language from the Democratic Party platform: Simply put, the Democratic Party does not strongly and unequivocally support a woman’s right to choose a safe and legal abortion regardless of her ability to pay. The Democratic Party has long accepted the current conventions, in which (for example) low-income women do not get Medicaid funding for abortions—in which they can’t get a safe and legal abortion unless they can pay for it on their own. Despite the language KO read, the party has made no recent attempt to roll back that long-standing convention, or others like it. Nor does it have any plan to do so as part of ongoing health reform, as every Democrat has made quite clear in discussions of the Stupak-Pitts problem. It took a real rube to read that platform language as if it drummed Stupak out of the party. A real rube—or a runner of same. (By the way: Joe Biden has always opposed Medicaid funding for abortions. Does he have to leave now too?) Sorry, but no. The Democratic Party isn’t trying to ensure the “right to choose a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay.” Maybe Keith didn’t understand that. More likely, he was simply treating his viewers like rubes—like tribal followers he could please with silly, inaccurate language. At any rate, go ahead and read the colloquy between Olbermann and Maddow. (Eventually, the transcript will show up here.) This is a very important topic. It’s important for people who care about health reform; it’s important for people who care about abortion rights. But to Olbermann and Maddow, is Stupak someone with different views—or is Stupak simply The Other? For our money, each of Olbermann’s four questions leaned toward making Stupak (and, in one case, Obama) The Other. To Olbermann and Maddow, Stupak doesn’t turn out to be someone with different views. He turns out to be a “double-crosser” who is helping “eclipse the moral issue.” He’s someone who is offering “sideways measures” because he “isn’t really man enough” to propose a constitutional measure which would ban all abortions. Of course, all these low-IQ claims could be brought against KO and Maddow! Example: They aren’t proposing a measure to provide full federal funding (or to remove all restrictions on the right to abortion); neither are their allies on this issue in the Democratic Party or in the pro-choice world. (We don’t offer that as a criticism.) Does Rachel think Keith “isn’t really man enough” to stand up and fight for that full measure? Is Keith too “cowardly” to do such a thing—the claim she makes against Stupak? In the end, the question we enjoyed the most was this question, Olbermann’s third: Rachel, is the real danger in this that the moral issue here suddenly gets eclipsed and we’re not talking about 44,000 Americans in the country who die every year because they don’t have enough health insurance, but we’re now off on what is—no matter how important you think it is—an ancillary point? The analysts did “slap five” on that, so perfectly chimp-like was Olbermann’s construct. After all, if we’re really “off on an ancillary point,” why don’t Olbermann and Maddow concede it, in the face of those 44,000 looming deaths? To state the obvious, Olbermann doesn’t seem to think this is “an ancillary point,” or he wouldn’t be resisting Stupak-Pitts. (Indeed: For most people, it isn’t “ancillary.”) But it’s the law of reptilian Culture War: The only “moral issues” which truly exist are the “moral issues” of one’s own tribe. The other tribe’s moral issues will always turn out to be just “a distraction,” the place where Maddow ends up. In this way, the other tribe always ends up as The Other. As it has been since we crawled from the swamp: The other tribe will always turn to be cowardly double-crossers engaged in distractions—“not really man enough.” He isn’t “brave enough;” he’s “cowardly.” People like Olbermann can’t accept a simple notion: They can’t accept the idea that different people, acting in good faith, may reach different moral judgments. Stupak’s judgments aren’t our own—but we don’t assume that he’s The Other. By way of contrast, Olbermann and Maddow staged a highly unintelligent hunt for The Other on last evening’s program. Ain’t entertainment grand? Up next/but first: Maddow went further on her own program, helping us locate The Other. Might we note a characterological point? Name-callers will start out name-calling the other party, or voters in general, or voters in some upstate district. Eventually, though, they’ll start to name-call those in their own party. By the way: For the past two weeks, Maddow has been mocking Republicans for the “purge” they’ve been conducting among their own. When Republicans do it, it’s a “Stalinist” purge (Frank Rich). When Democrats and cable hosts follow suit, it’s high-minded—really quite grand. THE RISE OF RUTH VAN WINKLE: Ruth Marcus wrote a very good column this week. But it leads down a very long trail. Marcus tackled a ginormous problem: The Republican Party’s endless stream of disinformation about American health care. You see, Marcus watched last Saturday’s House debate about the health reform bill. Like Rip Van Winkle emerging from a long nap, she was shocked—thoroughly blown away—by all the Republican bull-roar. Marcus wrote a very good column. But now that she has snapped awake, she has much more work to do. How much dissembling did Marcus observe? Her column spilled over with disinformation. Here’s the way the column began, including the shocked lady’s headline MARCUS (11/13/09): Health scare tactics/A GOP blizzard of untrue statements I'm hoping, for your sake, that you didn't spend your Saturday night as I did: watching the House debate health-care reform on C-SPAN. Pathetic, I know. The outcome wasn't in doubt, and the arguments were as familiar as an old pair of slippers. Moral imperative! Government takeover! Long-overdue protections! Crippling mandates! I'm not a huge fan of the House measure, but I was glad to see it straggle across the finish line, if only to keep the process going. And, by the end of the long debate, I was cheering for it even more because of the appalling amount of misinformation being peddled by its opponents. Newly emerged from a warm, cozy log, Van Marcus found herself confronted by an “appalling amount of misinformation.” “I don’t mean the usual hyperbole,” she said, citing several familiar groaners offered by usual GOP suspects. (Reps. Hensarling and Kingston.) Marcus had seen something worse. She had seen a “flood of sheer factual misstatements,” she quite correctly wrote in her column. As she continued, she offered this as her first example: MARCUS: The falsehood-peddling began at the top, with Minority Leader John Boehner: "If you're a Medicare Advantage enrollee . . . the Congressional Budget Office says that 80 percent of them are going to lose their Medicare Advantage." Not true. The CBO hasn't said anything of the sort. Boehner's office acknowledges that he misspoke: He meant to cite a study from the Medicare actuary estimating that projected enrollment would be down by 64 percent—if the cuts took effect. Choosing not to enroll in Medicare Advantage is different from "losing" it. The falsehoods began at the top, with Boehner. Marcus was shocked to see that the falsehoods didn’t end with him: MARCUS (continuing directly): But Boehner wasn't alone. Kentucky Republican Brett Guthrie: "The bill raises taxes for just about everyone." Not true. The bill imposes a surtax on the top 0.3 percent of households, individuals making more than $500,000 a year and couples making more than $1 million. Guthrie’s claim was blatantly wrong. But so too with Rep. Price: MARCUS (continuing directly): Georgia Republican Tom Price: "This bill, on Page 733, empowers the Washington bureaucracy to deny lifesaving patient care if it costs too much." Not true. The bill sets up a Center for Comparative Effectiveness Research "in order to identify the manner in which diseases, disorders, and other health conditions can most effectively and appropriately be prevented, diagnosed, treated, and managed clinically.” Are Republicans against figuring out what works? There's nothing in there about cost, and certainly nothing about denying "lifesaving patient care." “Not true”/“Not true”/”Not true,” she kept writing, as she quoted other howlers by Republican congressmen. (Price again; Camp; McKeon; Brown-Waite.) She finally closed her column with this, as if she’d just crawled from a log: MARCUS: You have to wonder: Are the Republican arguments against the bill so weak that they have to resort to these misrepresentations and distortions? “You have to wonder?” Actually, you don’t—if you’ve been alive on this planet during the past few decades of Republican disinformation about American health care. What Marcus saw is par for the course. Only Van Winkles don’t know that. And Democrats. And career liberals. And pseudo-liberal cable hosts. And of course, the mainstream press corps, which never saw a corporate-friendly disinformation campaign it wasn’t prepared to ignore. Marcus has been asleep for a while, so let’s clue her in on our recent history: The Republican Party has been spreading disinformation about health care for a very long time now. (If only she’d been able to see Candidate Giuliani parade about during Campaign 08!) Citizens have been handed familiar, well-scripted howlers—and since no one like Marcus ever speaks up, many citizens tend to believe the things they have endlessly heard. They’ve been told that “we have the best health care system in the world.” They’ve been told that “European-style health care has never worked anywhere it’s been tried.” They’ve been handed all manner of bull-roar and crap about waiting lists and long lines. And of course, they haven’t ever really been told about our astonishing level of spending. Had Marcus only been awake, she would have seen this disinformation campaign at work for the past several decades. She would have seen something else, of course: The utter failure of the mainstream press to respond to this torrent of disinformation. And failure of the “liberal” world. And the failure of the Democratic Party, including its most fiery liberals. Now that Marcus has started awake, she has a lot of work on her plate. Plainly, she was shocked by what she saw in the House this weekend. Once she starts to catch up on her reading, she’ll be shocked by a much wider “GOP blizzard of misinformation”—and by the failure of clowning “liberals” to address the situation she has finally been able to see. Marcus saw Boehner lie about health care. (Sorry: Engage in falsehood-peddling.) Last week, KO and Rachel saw something different. The twinned cable harlequins saw Boehner bungle a pointless point about the preamble to the Constitution. It provided some good solid fun for us rubes—and it provided a chance for Maddow to produce her own bungle in turn. (See THE DAILY HOWLER, 11/12/09.) But then, Marcus is living inside a Clown College, a point she will start to observe. For decades, disinformation has flowed like rain, widely accepted by all major sectors. She may begin to notice this fact, now that she’s fully awake. Warning: If Marcus decides to address this disgrace, she’ll find herself with little help. Now that she is fully awake, she will see how much of our world is really about culture war—about looking away from corporate rule, about keeping us rubes entertained.

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• 12 Nov 2009 09:11

  IN LOVE WITH WAR! Entertainers laughed at Boehner’s mistake. Then, they made their own: THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2009 Lucy wept: It has now been five days since Stupak-Pitts hit the scene. Do you know what it says? For ourselves, we don’t have the slightest idea, but we have a good excuse. You see, we read the newspapers! For example, we read this op-ed piece in this morning’s New York Times, by Kate Michelman and Frances Kissling. The pair are strongly opposed to Stupak-Pitts, which is perfectly fine by us. But go ahead—read their column! From that piece, do you know what Stupak-Pitts says or does? Can you even clearly make out what they say it does? What does Michelman think the amendment would do? Frankly, we aren’t sure. But then, we also read Jeff Sharlet’s piece inSalon. Sharlet makes this claim about “the facts,” which are said to be “plain:” SHARLET (11/10/09): Stupak, the Democratic co-chair of the House Pro-Life Caucus, insists that his amendment does nothing more than ensure that the 1976 Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of federal funds for abortions, is carried over into healthcare reform. Even some of Stupak's angriest critics within the party concede that Stupak might actually believe that—nobody has ever accused him of being a subtle legislator. (Though Stupak himself, long known for his amiability, now boasts that he was hiding his "wolfiness" all along.) But the facts are plain: Stupak-Pitts will use the Hyde Amendment as a lever with which to radically roll back abortion rights, effectively strong-arming private insurers—most of which will be enmeshed with the federal government now—into abandoning coverage for abortions. “The facts are plain”—but Sharlet’s presentation isn’t. Is Sharlet saying that Stupak-Pitts would “effectively” mean that private insurers will “abandon coverage for abortions” altogether? That no one would be able to buy insurance which included such coverage? We’d guess that this is what he means, although his statement isn’t clear. Nor does Sharlet make any attempt to show why this claim would be accurate. After reading Sharlet, we also read this piece by Kate Harding, which Salon had twinned with Sharlet’s piece. Harding says that Stupak-Pitts would “restrict access to abortion in unprecedented ways”—and that certainly may be true. But go ahead. See if Harding ever explains or tries to defend the statement. In what way would Stupak restrict access? How do we know it would do so? We read all the way to the end. Harding didn’t say. Last night, on , Chris Matthew was leading his latest confused discussion. As the incoherent fumbling proceeded, Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, made a reference we found ironic. Keenan referred, several times, to “the Stupak language”—without ever making any attempt to quote that language. What is the language of Stupak-Pitts? We’ve watched and read a lot of discussions. To this day, we haven’t seen any language from the amendment actually being quoted. What does Stupak-Pitts say? If it passed into law, what would Stupak-Pitts do? Like you, we really have no idea—and we aren’t the only ones tearing our hair. On Olympus, Lucy watched the cable debates with Piltdown Man last night. Despite her famously small skull capacity, Lucy eventually wept. “I really thought we’d be doing better by now,” the fossilized figure sadly said, shaking her small hairy head PART 4—IN LOVE WITH WAR: At least two cheers for Nicholas Kristof, who writes today about the way our health care “system” can affect real people. He writes about one of the 45,000 Americans who die each year from lack of insurance. And he writes about her daughter KRISTOF (11/12/09): Who are these Americans who die for lack of insurance? Dr. Linda Harris, an ob-gyn in Oregon tells of Sue, a 31-year-old patient of hers. Sue was a single mom who worked hard—sometimes two jobs at once—to ensure that her beloved daughter would enjoy a better life. Sue's jobs never provided health insurance, and Sue felt she couldn't afford to splurge on herself to get gynecological checkups. For more than a dozen years, she never had a Pap smear, although one is recommended annually. Even when Sue began bleeding and suffering abdominal pain, she was reluctant to see a doctor because she didn't know how she would pay the bills. Finally, Sue sought help from a hospital emergency room, and then from the low-cost public clinic where Dr. Harris works. Dr. Harris found that Sue had advanced cervical cancer. Three months later, she died. Her daughter was 13. ''I get teary whenever I think about her,'' Dr. Harris said. ''It was so needless .” This mother was 31 years of age. The daughter she left is 13. In a country where this happens so often, why doesn’t it produce more concern? Why doesn’t it produce an insistence on universal coverage? For one thing, some people don’t, and never will, care. (Check Gail Collins’ latest piece, which enjoys some good solid fun about New Zealand’s health care.) Other explanations have been offered, by Paul Krugman for example—explanations which are specific to American culture. It’s also true that America’s career liberal world has never done a very good job bringing this problem home to the public. But then, career liberals have failed even more flamboyantly when it comes to the issue of costs—when it comes to discussing the massive looting built into our health care spending. This looting should activate self-interest on behalf of the public. But career liberals—Serious People all—simply don’t raise such crude points. Most voters don’t know that they’re being looted. Serious People don’t tell them. Sorry, crackers! Your career liberal world is in thrall to The Interests, in ways good liberals know to ignore. Beyond that, large segments of the liberal world mainly love the endless thrill of our culture war. Leading liberals have very good health care themselves; to be honest, they show few signs of giving a sh*t about the hapless rubes who don’t. Quite often, they tend to simper and play the fool, as Olbermann did last Thursday night when it came to that GOP health plan (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 11/11/09). Could anyone play the fool in a more fulsome way than this big culture-nut did—shrieking and wailing and pretending that Michele Bachmann had been “inciting a hateful rebellion against the rule of law and order” and “possibly encouraging violence against the government?” Bachmann is one of the biggest fools around—until we turn our own fools loose! Let’s recall the setting. By last Thursday, the CBO’s new analysis had made it clear that the long-delayed GOP health plan was just a big rolling joke. But Olbermann mentioned this problem in passing. Drawing from that day’s Republican rally, he preferred to clown about Bachmann’s non-existent incitement to violence. After that, he clowned like this: OLBERMANN (11/5/09): At least Congressman Broun knows how the Constitution starts. The Republicans’ top dog can’t even cite the correct document. REP. JOHN BOEHNER (): I’m going to stand with you and all freedom-loving Americans against this bill. This is my copy of the Constitution. And I‘m going to stand here with our Founding Fathers, who wrote in the preamble, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” If Minority Leader Boehner had read his prop copy of the Constitution, perhaps he’d know that he was actually quoting the Declaration of Independence—or maybe he thinks that’s the same thing as the Constitution. Which might explain the Republican health care bill Minority Leader Boehner’s office having falsely claimed that that bill, once it was finally revealed, would cover millions more Americans than the Democrats’ bill would. In fact, it would cover fewer millions Americans, making the nation’s health care crisis that much worse. Boehner had made a silly mistake—a silly mistake which was also completely irrelevant to any serious discussion. But clowns like Olbermann feed off silly irrelevance. In the next hour, his silly partner played the same silly card, helping us laugh at Dumb Boehner again. But uh-oh! Even as she ridiculed Boehner, she too made a silly mistake! You see, Rep. Todd Akin had forgotten to say “indivisible” when he led the pledge of allegiance at the Republican rally. We got to laugh at his silly mistake, and at Boehner’s mistake as well. But doggone it! In the process, Our Own Rhodes Scholar made her own silly blunder! MADDOW (11/5/09): Congressman Akin was not alone in stumbling over a little basic U.S. history. He had some good company in the top Republican in the house, minority leader John Boehner. BOEHNER (videotape): This is my copy of the Constitution. And I`m going to stand here with our Founding Fathers who wrote in the preamble, "We hold these truths to be self-evident." The Constitution doesn’t have a preamble. Stop it! That would be the Declaration of Independence! There was also this bit of unfortunate stage craft that happened as right-wing talk show radio host Mark Levin took to the mike... “The Constitution doesn’t have a preamble?” Even as she wasted your time with the other tribe’s silly mistakes, she made a silly mistake of her own! To her credit, Maddow corrected herself the next night. “Being myself constitutionally incapable of leaving well enough alone,” she said, “I then excitedly exclaimed, not that he wasn’t reading from the preamble to the Constitution, but there wasn’t a preamble to the Constitution at all, which, of course, is total nonsense and which I’m very sorry to have said.” Our silly mistake didn’t count. Maddow had just been “excited.” Everyone makes silly mistakes, of course, which is why they aren’t worth wasting time on. Unless you’re really an entertainer—an entertainer who’s also in love with a long, dumb, inane culture war. Supposedly, Maddow makes a million dollars per year. Reportedly, KO makes five. Presumably, each has excellent health care. Perhaps that’s why they tend to behave the way top-shelf pseudo-liberals have always behaved. Each seems to love that dumb culture war, which brings us around to those signs at that rally. Let’s review: By last Thursday, the CBO had made it clear that the GOP health plan was a big screaming joke. Meanwhile, Bachmann had staged a small, silly rally at the Capitol, to which a few benighted souls had brought a few sad, ridiculous signs. Let’s see—which item was more significant? On the one hand, a major party’s health care plan was a big, ridiculous, screaming joke. On the other hand, a couple of dummies had a few stupid signs, which they had displayed at a rally. Within our chimp-run cable culture, it’s clear which matter gets top billing! But then, pseudo-liberals all over the culture screeched about those sad, stupid signs. That’s because pseudo-liberals, for the past fifty years, have loved a dumb culture war. We love the idea that we’re the smart ones—although it’s clear that we aren’t. We love the idea that we’re the moral ones—that the other tribe spills with racists. And in part because we love this war, we have been wholly unable, in the past fifty years, to build a case for health care reform. We’re the smart ones, we love to insist—and yet, our latest plan for health reform is melting down into a joke. (We didn’t see the abortion fight coming! How strange, since we’re so smart!) We live with a cosmically awful health system—a system characterized by needless deaths and comical levels of looting. But despite our brilliance and our moral grandeur, we can’t figure out how to make voters understand the need for large-scale reform. For fifty years, The Interests have spread their false messaging all around. (European health care is a disaster! They have to wait in lines!) Despite our own acknowledged brilliance, they have beaten us blue in the process. Guess what, losers? The public isn’t going to move because some fool at a silly pep rally was holding a sad, stupid sign. The public isn’t going to care if Boehner makes some silly mistake—right before Our Own Rhodes Scholar makes her own, that is. And the public will respond rather poorly to invidious, race-based culture wars waged by losers like Frank Rich. Could anything be dumber than insulting a northern-border, blue-trending congressional district which supported Obama by five points because too many of its voters are white? With telling them that, because they’re white, they ought to move to Utah? But then, Olbermann and his Pulitzer Hacks ran to the same foolish card last Thursday. Forget about that bogus health plan. Most people at the rally were white! (In fairness, we like and admire Clarence Page. We’d like to see him resist the long slow slide into this kind of self-defeating nonsense.) “Terrifying,” Olbermann said, looking at all the white faces. Can human beings get dumber? A great deal of pseudo-liberal politics has always been about culture war. It has been about the fairly ludicrous claim that We are smarter and better than They are. But wouldn’t you know it? Because we love to mock average voters, we have little success in winning them over! Faced with people inclined to differ from us in some ways, we have no idea what to say or do—how to address their different impulses. Thanks to our powerful cultural arrogance—thanks to our own overpowering dumbness—we have no idea how to address their tendency toward different strokes. We have no clue about how to persuade. We mainly know how to lodge insults. Their limbic brains aren’t working right! Every one is a redneck racist! Result? The liberal world is like the apocryphal fellow who can’t sell ice at the equator. Given the world’s most comically awful health “system,” we can’t even convince average people that they should favor far-reaching reform. Given a comically bogus GOP plan, we go on the TV machine and pretend that Bachmann was “inciting a hateful rebellion against the rule of law and order” and “possibly encouraging violence against the government.” And as we fail, we keep insisting that they are the ones who are dumb. We’re too dumb to know, or to discuss, why the moral argument—the argument for universal coverage—has never quite worked well enough in this country. We’re too dumb to see how helpful it would be to argue the case against looting. And by the way: Your “leaders” all have excellent health care! Could that explain their often clowning approach to this life-and-death issue? Last night, a guest confronted Ed Schultz with this problem (more tomorrow). To our ear, Schultz didn’t know what to say. We love to say how smart we are—as we keep getting our keisters kicked. In truth, you can’t get dumber than Olbermann and Rich—or more profoundly immature. By the way, did you hear about Carrie Prejean’s sex tape? Crackers! That’s entertainment! About those signs: Do you realize how many foolish signs—and foolish sentiments—were present at anti-war rallies during the Bush years? We used to refer to this sort of “analysis” as “nut-picking”—until we adopted the practice.

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• 11 Nov 2009 14:32

  HE WAR FOR TERROR! A shrieking host was terrified by the faces he saw on the Hill: WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2009 This just in from a small inbred club: If you want an excuse to tear your hair, just spend a night watching cable pundits as they try to explain almost any issue. For example, consider the way they have tried to explain the so-called Stupak amendment. Over the weekend, the Stupak amendment ended up in the House health care reform bill. Monday evening, at the top of her show, Rachel Maddow explained what it meant: MADDOW (11/9/09): Snatching electoral defeat from the jaws of victory here, Democrats have decided to pass monumental, sweeping, legacy-building health reform, inexplicably along with the biggest restriction on abortion rights in a generation. It’s called the Stupak amendment, named for Democratic Congressman Bart Stupak of Michigan. And if his amendment becomes law, if the bill passes as is, insurance companies across the country would likely stop covering abortions-period. Stupak's language in the House bill says that anyone who gets a government subsidy to buy insurance through the health insurance exchange would be banned from buying any insurance plan that covers abortion services. So, if you're an insurance company that wants to participate in the new health insurance exchange, if you want access to this new pool of millions of Americans, tens of millions of Americans, choosing between insurance plans on the exchange—well, the CBO says about 90 percent of those people will be getting some kind of government subsidy in the exchange. And if they're getting any sort of government subsidy, they can't even choose your insurance plan if they want to, unless you drop abortion coverage. The effect of this law isn't just no federal funding for abortions. That's the law now. The effect of this law is likely to be no insurance coverage for abortion in the United States—period. Really? Is that what final passage of the Stupak amendment would mean? No insurance coverage for abortion—period? That’s always possible, of course, though Maddow’s logic seemed a bit tortured to us. Why couldn’t insurance companies offer some policies which cover abortion—and other policies which didn’t? How hard could that possibly be? We were a bit puzzled by Maddow’s claim—but no worry! In this same segment, Maddow was going to interview Rep. Diana DeGette, who is leading the Democratic push-back against the amendment. In a rational world, this would likely help clarify things. This was Maddow’s introduction: MADDOW: Joining us now, Democratic Congresswoman Diana DeGette of Colorado, co-chair of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus. She is circulating that letter which now has about 40 signatures of House Democrats who say they will oppose the health care bill if it's used to restrict abortion rights. Congresswoman DeGette, thanks very much for joining us tonight. DEGETTE.: It's good to be with you again, Rachel. MADDOW: In terms of the substance of the Stupak amendment, how big a setback is this for access to abortion services in this country? That was an obvious opening question—the first of four questions Maddow would ask. But go ahead—read the full interview! (For the transcript, just click here.) DeGette never offered anything like the prognosis Maddow had just presented—nor did Maddow ever ask DeGette about her sweeping prediction. Would the Stupak amendment do what Maddow had said? Would it “likely [mean] no insurance coverage for abortion in the United States—period?” We don’t have the first freaking idea. You see, Maddow never asked! Maddow constantly does things like this. But in fairness, the confusion has been general over cable TV this week. We’ve seen endless discussions of Stupak—but very few attempts to define what the amendment would actually do. The haplessness of cable hosts has been on stark display. At least we got to enjoy one mordant laugh. Last night, after two straight nights of conceptual chaos on the always-confused cable program Hardball, Chris Matthews said this to Cynthia Tucker, right at the end of his hour: TUCKER (11/10/09): As if the Senate bill didn’t have enough problems, enough political complications, now they have to deal with the abortion issue. Quite frankly, I think the majority of members of Congress in the House and in the Senate want to do just one thing, preserve the status quo, the Hyde amendment, which says no taxpayer money may be used to fund abortion. And I think most of the 64 people who voted for the Stupak amendment thought they were doing that. But it goes much farther than that. The Stupak amendment says that private insurers may not sell policies that give full reproductive rights coverage in the exchange.So even if I can afford my own insurance, if I’m not getting a government subsidy at all, I cannot buy on that exchange. MATTHEWS: Well said! That’s the first time somebody’s explained it clearly, Howard! FINEMAN: Yes, and the rationale was that since some people in that exchange are going to be getting subsidies, you can`t allow anybody the possibility of using that subsidy with that program. I think it can be—Cynthia’s right. They’re going to have to tailor the language. It’s going to have to be very carefully rewritten. It’s going to be one of those things like the opt-in or opt-out, or the trigger or no-trigger. When they come down to the conference committee, which eventually this will do, they’ll have language trying to tease out those specifics. That’s the first time somebody’s explained it clearly! Since Matthews himself had been leading discussions of this topic for two straight nights, just whose fault was that? Meanwhile, Tucker’s explanation was fairly clear—but was it accurate and complete? It didn’t occur to Matthews to ask. Finally, Fineman should be led away to a padded room in The Land of the Meaningless Cable Babblers. Go ahead! Just try to make sense of what he said! Sorry: Just try to tease out his specifics! Today, we’ll offer one small tip for those who are watching their culture implode. Understand this: The people you see on your TV machine basically can’t explain sh*t. In truth, these are very unintelligent people. That includes the Pulitzer winners—which is to say, almost everyone who has a column. These people belong to a small inbred club. So do the Pulitzer voters. PART 3—THE WAR FOR TERROR: In a slightly different world, last Thursday would have been a sad day for the Republican Party. After months of delay, the party had released its health reform plan—and it didn’t amount to a lot. If you watched , you heard a typically jumbled and hurried account of what the plan did and didn’t do (see THE HOWLER, 11/10/09). The next morning, an editorial provided a somewhat clearer sense of what the plan was about: NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (11/6/09): House Republican leaders have produced their own health care reform bill. Here is the first thing you need to know: It would do almost nothing to reduce the scandalously high number of Americans who have no insurance. And it makes only a token stab at slowing the relentlessly rising costs of medical care. Despite that, the Republicans are pitching their bill as far more affordable than the Democrats' approach. And you are sure to hear a lot in coming days about how it could reduce health insurance premiums. How it compares in that respect with the Democratic proposal is not yet clear. But a lot of the Republicans' savings on premiums come from reduced coverage. Pay less and get less. [...] There's no question that the Republicans' bill is cheaper because it does so little to help the uninsured. According to the Congressional Budget Office, it would provide $61 billion over 10 years to expand coverage, compared with more than $1 trillion in the Democrats' bill. That paltry effort, the budget office estimates, would extend coverage to a few million people who would otherwise be uninsured in 2019, leaving 52 million citizens and legal residents below Medicare age without coverage or about 17 percent of that population, right where it is today. This is a dismaying abdication of responsibility. The Republican bill wouldn’t cost a lot—and it would accomplish even less! Ten years out, 52 million would be uninsured. The cost of premiums would be somewhat reduced—largely due to reduced coverage. In the opinion of the editors, this proposal represented “a dismaying abdication of responsibility.” It would have been a sad day for Republicans—if Democrats and liberals had ever created a world in which the bulk of voters actually cared about expanding coverage and reducing the cost of premiums. But in all honesty, Democrats and liberals have never created any such world. For an example of what we do instead, let’s return to Keith Olbermann’s clowning on last Thursday night’s Toward the end of the program’s first segment, Olbermann and Clarence Page would fumble their way through a rushed attempt to explain the Republican proposal. But Olbermann’s main objective this night involved something quite different—a long, dumb culture war. On this same day, Republican leaders had staged a dumb rally on the steps of the Capitol building—and Olbermann was eager to shriek and wail about what had transpired. Last night, this big dumb oaf wasted everyone-s time ranting about Carrie Prejean—again! But last Thursday, our dumbest of oafs was wailing about Michele Bachmann. In his shrieking and screaming, he treated his viewers like addled fools—and helped show why progressive ideas rarely win: OLBERMANN (11/5/09): Good evening from New York. An elected Republican official today is leading a protest on the west steps of the Capitol that compared health care reform to Nazi death camps and encouraged mindless harassment of and possibly violence against the government. Not tea-baggers anymore, not demagogic commentators, an actual congresswoman inciting a hateful rebellion against the rule of law and order. Her name is Michele Bachmann. Remember when primal nitwits like Olbermann/Maddow pretended they were offended by “the politics of fear?” Last Thursday, Olbermann propped himself over his fainting couch and offered that utterly silly account of the sad and silly rally Bachmann and the others had produced. But then, silly people have always needed each other—to maintain their inane culture wars. How silly was our shrieking host this night? Consider the cosmic foolishness of that, his opening wail. How foolish was Olbermann’s opening wail? According to Olbermann, Bachmann had led a protest that day which “compared health care reform to Nazi death camps.” (More on that tomorrow.) Not only that: Her protest had “encouraged harassment of the government”—“and possibly violence against it!” And not only that: On this day, an actual congresswoman had been spotted “inciting a hateful rebellion against the rule of law and order!” But how exactly had Bachmann done that? Moments later, Olbermann, reaching for smelling salts, played the utterly pitiful tape which supposedly proved his case: OLBERMANN: Congresswoman Bachmann, urging these people to rebel. BACHMANN (videotape): It was Thomas Jefferson who said a revolution every now and then is a good thing. What do you think? (CHEERING) BACHMANN: You feel so good right now, and we, the members of Congress that are gathered on these steps for this press conference, are so honored that you are here. Sadly, that was Olbermann’s evidence that an actual congresswoman had been spotted “inciting a hateful rebellion against the rule of law and order”—“possibly encouraging violence against the government.” Go ahead—read the full transcript. Out of that utterly pointless moment, this big nut had crafted that wail. A few moments later, Gene Robinson arrived to clown along with the shrieking host—and the shrieking host played it again. “Today, we saw a member of Congress encouraging harassment of the government, fomenting—her word was revolution,” KO said. No, you can’t get dumber than that—but KO was willing to try. He dragged out two—Count em, two!—Pulitzer winners to play along with his silly clowning. And sure enough! Obeying the rules of pseudo-liberal war, the shrieking host was soon asserting that the event was been rancid with racism: OLBERMANN: But today was when the Republicans say, “We own this.” There is racism in here. There is bigotry. There‘s refusal to acknowledge the outcome of an election that was a pretty clear-cut decision. There is a misunderstanding of a vital health care issue. There are a lot of things going on here. But they’re being stoked up into a rage and this was not—correct me if I‘m wrong about this—but this was the day the Republican Party said, “Yes, we’ll take this. We’ll run on this. We’ll become the party of hate.” “We’ll become the party of hate?” Look who’s talking, the eye-rolling analysts cried, choking back laughter as this great pseudo-liberal wept about the alleged “refusal to acknowledge the outcome of an election.” They had no idea what KO meant by that—Bachmann got elected last year, too—and they searched and searched, all through this segment, for Olbermann’s evidence of all that bigotry and racism. Sorry: Olbermann never made any real attempt to explain this ultimate crowd-pleasing charge. But by the end of his segment with Robinson, he offered this bit of silly rank garbage—and acknowledged his own state of terror: OLBERMANN: On an associated point with this: How did the organizers of this not realize, “You know what? We had better get, somehow, even if we’ll have to pay them to show up, some black faces, some brown faces, some Asian people, or somebody in this crowd, other than the crowd that we’ve seen at every piece of videotape that looked like—that looked exactly the same. This is otherwise going to look like a pro-apartheid rally in South Africa 35 or 40 years ago. ROBINSON: Well, now, this is going to sound tendentious, Keith. OLBERMANN: All right. ROBINSON: But I went to the Republican National Convention last year, and you did not see many minorities there. And it— Look, this is a, this is a party that has been more and more hostile to minorities, to Latinos, to African-Americans. It’s certainly perceived that way and this didn’t help that image at all. That—you know, that seems to be the hand they’ve decided to play. It’s terrifying. Gene Robinson of MSNBC and the Washington Post—as always, great thanks, Gene. ROBINSON: Good to talk to you. If you don’t understand how stupid that is, you ought to stop following politics. By Sunday, the shrieking Frank Rich was playing the same addled card—against a district in upstate New York which had supported Obama over McCain, by five points. In the view of the shrieking Lord Rich, that district didn’t have enough blacks and Hispanics either. For that reason, the district belonged in Utah, this highest and dumbest lord said. Bachmann had staged an utterly silly, utterly inconsequential pep rally. A day or two earlier, the CBO had let us see how silly and inconsequential the Republican “health plan” was. But in the real world, in your actual nation, Bachmann’s party and its allies continued to kick the sh*t out of our own hapless “health reform plan.” Once agin, we were back to a logical problem: How can a gang of nitwits like Bachmann keep kicking the shit out of fellows like Olbermann/Rich? The answer lies in those shrieking rants—in their love for a sick/stupid culture war, their love of pure ongoing hatred. Tomorrow—Part 4: Preambling into history!

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